


The Chalice

by dogsshouldvote



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, What-If, it has been so long since I have written and I no longer know how this tagging system works, just have fun I guess!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-09-22
Packaged: 2018-10-15 08:54:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 28,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10553554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogsshouldvote/pseuds/dogsshouldvote
Summary: Magnus never thought he was one for power, but there's one power he can't resist: the power to see how things could have been, if his happy, normal life had never been brought to a tragic halt.When he's offered the chalice, Magnus rushes in.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, all! This is my first fanfic in a very long time, and certainly my first TAZ fic! After hearing what we could have had in TTAZZ, I couldn't resist putting down at least one version of how I figure it would have gone. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with/how far I'll take this, but I hope you enjoy what I've got. 
> 
> (Also, credit to the McElroys where it's due; as a straight-up canon-divergence, we've got some direct quotes going on here. You'll know them when you see them!)

Power doesn’t tempt Magnus. It never has. Oh, sure, he’s proud of the physical feats he can do - and rightly so - but those are things that he toiled and worked for, things that served a purpose. He hadn’t been tempted to kill Governor Kalan, seize his power for his own, so he sure as hell wouldn’t be tempted to grasp any of these relics offering him power and control. What would he even do with them? 

This is a different kind of power, one that he had never anticipated before, one that he never even _dared_ imagine. Those sorts of daydreams are what resulted in people like Lucas, playing with forces they didn’t know the power of, and ruining lives in the process. That’s what he should be considering now, there’s a part of him that knows that’s what he should be considering, but then Julia walks in, and everything else fades away. All he can do is cry, shoulders hunched, one arm wrapped around his gut like he’d just been punched, the other hand slapped across his mouth to uselessly try to restrain his sobs. 

“Two days after your departure, Kalan returns to Raven’s Roost, and operating from a mindset of “If I can’t have this city, nobody can”, he bombs the support column for the Craftsman Corridor. 76 people died. Julia and your mentor included. Hammer and Tongs is quite literally shattered. And after the two and ten days it takes to get to Neverwinter and back, most of the town’s evacuated, sort of afraid of similar attacks on their columns. And today, Raven’s Roost is just a ghost town. Magnus, you earned this happy ending. You worked so hard for it. It should have been yours. But it hasn’t happened yet, not here, not yet, not now. If you claim me, you can still stop Kalan, you can save Julia, you can save Steven, you can save Raven’s Roost, you can save this life that you earned. Take me, and we can do it together.”

June didn’t have to tell him what happened next. Even though he wasn’t there, there’s a part of him that will always see it in his mind’s eye, ever-changing but always with the same result. He’s not sure what compels him to open his mouth to speak, but somehow, it’s the only thing he can think of. 

“It’s not what Julia would have wanted.” 

June hesitates, an odd sort of compassion in those ageless eyes. She moves in a stutter at first, as if working against some internal programming, but eventually moves to his side, placing one hand on the crook of his elbow. When Magnus looks down at her, there seems to be wisdom in her eyes.

“When was the last time you thought about what you wanted?”

“I…”

It’s not that he’s not happy. He had thought for so long that he wouldn’t ever be happy again, but then he met Taako and Merle, a new family, but family all the same. He found a place to call home again, there with them and Carey and Killian and Angus and Avi and the Director, people whose friendship he treasures beyond measure, people he would die for. 

But Julia is still in front of him, frozen with a fond sort of smile on her face, and there he is, one hand on the doorknob. There had been a life waiting for him, full and happy, one that wouldn’t disappear after they find their last Relic, one that is still worth saving.

\--

When they’re all seated at the table again, Magnus can feel Taako and Merle’s eyes boring into him. He doesn’t see it - can’t bring himself to look them in the eye, not after what he’s already decided - but he can feel it. They know him well enough to know when something’s wrong, and sitting here, head ducked, eyes still puffy and red, it’s as clear as the crooked nose on his face. He can hardly pay attention to Jule rattling off all of these little rules that add up to a lifetime of happiness. When she’s through, Taako and Merle both look at him first, expecting him to rush in. 

He doesn’t. He keeps his head low, doesn’t even look June in the eye, and waits. He made a pact to himself in that gap between then and now, and it’s simple: while he may be electing to give up this life with them, he still cares about Taako and Merle. They get first dibs on the Chalice, should they want it. Who’s he to take their happiness away from them? If they don’t, then it’s fair game.

Silence stretches for a little longer than comfortable before Merle pipes up.

“I’m not a big one for regrets. I figure you make your best choices with the information at hand, and you live with those choices. So I’m going to say thanks but no thanks, little strange girl with a chalice!” His voice is almost a little too jovial, and for a moment, Magnus is envious of the flippancy with which he speaks.

It doesn’t take long for Taako to pipe up either. “So, listen. My vision was chill as hell. I have nothing to change! I never did anything wrong, I feel amazing. I’m in the best possible timeline for Taako. So that’s a pass from me too.”

Three sets of eyes swivel towards Magnus, two sets of them concerned, one filled with the eagerness of someone who already knows that she’s one. “Magnus?” June asks, voice almost gentle. “I’m going to need to hear your answer as well.”

 

Magnus breathes in deeply through his nose and, for the first time since they entered this odd pocket out of time, looks up. When he looks over at Taako and Merle, there’s a part of him that almost loses his nerve, the idea of a life without them almost as unimaginable as life without Julia once was. He shakes it off and slowly, methodically, unclips Steven from his belt and raises him to his face, looking him in his eyes. He’ll be with the real thing, now, but it hurts to say good-bye anyway, and he gives his bowl one last kiss before sliding it over towards where Merle is seated beside him.

They know what’s about to happen by now, both rising out of their seats, sputtering, but he holds up one hand to halt whatever speeches they’re about to get out. “Listen, boys. I never thought, I -- I didn’t think I would ever find happiness again, after Julia died. And I did, with you. I never want you to think it wasn’t enough, or that I didn’t care about you, or the Bureau, but -- “ He stops, takes a breath and says, almost pleadingly, “I need to know.”

“Now, son,” Merle says, stepping forward and resting his wooden hand on Magnus’ forearm, not so dissimilar to how June had comforted him earlier, “are you sure about this? This is a big decision! And you’re not thinking clearly! What you need is a good night’s rest, get allllll of this out of your head, what with all the dying and all, and you’ll be right as rain. Right, Taako?” Merle leans, hopping a little as he tries to get Taako’s attention, waggling his brows meaningfully. He coughs. “I said right, Taako?”

“There’s no take-backsies from this one, my man,” Taako says finally, an odd sort of crease between his brows. “Are you really sure you want this? You take that, and poof! No more Bureau, no more doing your whole saving people schtick, no more… whatever this is.”

“Yes. This is what I want.”

_Yes_ , June’s eyes seem to say. _This is what you want._

“Taako, Merle… thank you for everything you’ve done, but this is what I want,” he says, again. “This is what I need. I need to know how things could have been - how things were supposed to be. I hope you understand.”

Neither seem to know what to say, but as if in silent assent, Merle reaches forward and cradles Steven’s fishbowl in the crook of his wooden arm.

And what else can Magnus do? He rushes in.

He takes the chalice, and everything changes.


	2. Chapter 2

When Magnus opens his eyes again, it’s like coming alive for the first time. He can feel everything, from the metal of the doorknob beneath his hand to the familiar worn wood beneath his boots. He can hear the crackle of the fire behind him, the rustle of pages as Julia idly flips through them, the quiet creak of Steven’s chair. It sounds and smells like a home long since forgotten, and for a moment, all Magnus can do is breathe it all in.

His family is behind him. When he turns this time, they’ll be there in front of him, hearty and hale and _alive_. But even though Magnus’ world has stopped, it hasn’t done the same for Steven and Julia.

“I was only kidding about the grandmas, Magnus,” Julia says, voice a little concerned, though it still hasn’t lost that teasing lilt. “They’re going to love it.”

Magnus shudders, just a little bit, and turns around. There they are in front of him, and no amount of staring at the vision that June had spun for him could have prepared him for this. He knows that he needs to keep this timeline stable, that he has to act normal, but he wants more than anything to wrap Julia in a hug and kiss her again, to actually hug Steven instead of shaking his hand, and to never let either of them go. “Julia,” he says. “I shouldn’t - I shouldn’t go, I shouldn’t leave you and Steven here alone. I don’t need some guy to tell me I’m good at what I do. I _know_ I’m good at what I do.”

Julia and Steven share twin looks of alarm, and she steps forward. “What’s gotten into you? This is all you’ve been able to talk about for weeks.”

“Titles aren’t all that empty, son. You getting that title will be be good for business, and you know it,” Steven says, never mind that their plates are full as it is, but he knows how much this competition means to Magnus - to the Magnus that this is supposed to be, the one who doesn't exist anymore, who will never exist again.

“Right.” Magnus pinches at the bridge of his nose. He didn’t plan for this, he should have had a plan, he needs a way to preserve this timeline and make it seem natural and make it work. How does he make this work? “Right, right. I don’t - I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me. Of course I’ll go.” 

Magnus still can’t resist surging forward to wrap Julia in the tightest hug he can muster, breathing her scent in deep, memorizing the feeling of her body against his own, the feel of her curly hair against his cheek. “I love you, Jules.”

“I love you too,” she says, hugging him back, but swatting his shoulder once he holds on for a little too long, still looking bewildered by his behaviour. “Now, go! We’ll be waiting for you once you get back!”

“Yeah Um… yeah. Thanks for everything, Steven,” he says, walking forward to shake his hand for the second time in as many minutes (which the man accepts willingly but with no shortage of confusion on his end) when Magnus glances up. On the mantle, nestled among the carved knick-knacks and cheesy etchings from a trip that Steven and Julia had taken to the seaside a lifetime ago, is the Chalice, looking as natural as if it had been there all along. 

Magnus swallows, looks behind him one more time, and leaves. He can feel Julia’s eyes on his back from the window as he swings the chair none-too-gently on the cart (somehow the whole Master Carpenter thing rings hollow now that he knows the price), gets in the driver’s seat, and wheels away. 

This can be his happy ending, but it isn’t, not yet. He’ll go and win that title all over again, come back home victorious, as if this is what he had wanted all along, and things will be better. 

Things will be better, because on his way to the competition, he’s going to kill Governor Kalan.

\--

Five years ago, the ride to the next town over had felt like it had taken forever. It took all day, certainly, which was long for him at the time, all nerves and uncertainty about the competition, unused to being away from home for more than a day or two at a time. This time, he’s used to far, far longer journeys than this, and it feels like nothing.

It’s a bit of a shock walking into town and being greeted with smiles - _The Hammer!_ People greet him, _I have a brother out in Raven’s Roost - you eat here for free, and that’s that!_ \- like another echo from another life, one where people thought that Kalan had been dealt with and that had been that, greeting him with congratulations instead of apologies. It’s almost too easy to ask around about Kalan’s whereabouts, although the three people he asked didn’t seem to have a clue.

Eventually, he winds up at the Great Bear Pub & Inn, perched on a stool as he waves down the barkeep, a tall, broad elf with a beer gut and a beautiful smile. “Well, well, well!” She says, sauntering over to him. “If it isn’t The Hammer. No offense, but I hope you’re not expecting a free drink.”

“Just Magnus is fine,” he offers. “And don’t worry, I’ve got more than enough to pay. I’ll just have an ale, please.”

“Comin’ right up. What brings you here, anyway?”

“Just stopping here for the night. There’s a carpentry competition, way out in Neverwinter - I’m hoping to, uh, earn my stripes there,” he says, the lie almost smooth enough to be convincing, but lucky for him, the elf doesn’t seem to care an awful lot about why he’s here, or about any carpentry competition for that matter. 

She just slides him the ale, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “Sounds fun. Now, I’m guessing you’ll be needing a room too in that case, and I’d recommend you stay here, not in that awful place across town - and I’m not just saying that because they’re the competition, mind you! They’d just as soon rob you blind as serve you a good meal, that’s sure as shit, if you’ll pardon my language.”

 

He waves off her apology, takes a swig of his ale, wipes the foam off of his upper lip. “Don’t worry about it. I’m, uh… I’m not sure why you’re telling me this, though? I’ll stay here, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Becaaaaaause…” She leans forward against the bar, until her nose almost touches Magnus' who, incredibly uncomfortable, immediately shifts away. “A little bird told me you’ve been asking around about the Governor.”

His brows shoot up. He thought he’d been subtle enough about it. He plans to kill the man, but he sure as hell doesn’t want to get caught, or else it’ll get back to Julia and Steven and the rest of Raven’s Roost, and then he’ll be in a heap of trouble explaining that one. “I don’t know what --”

He’s a bad liar, and she can see right through it. She just laughs, and dangles a key in front of him. “My name’s Cecily, and yes, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Go, wash up. No offense meant, but you need it - horse and bad perfume isn’t a great combination. I’ll be knocking on your door in…” She glances up at the clock. “An hour, so be quick about it.”

And what else can he do, really? He quickly swigs the rest of his ale (which he needs so, so badly; he feels like he could sleep for a month and still not recover - between all of their deaths, coming back here and acting like all the emotion hasn’t been carefully wrung out of him, he feels like he hasn’t had a good night’s rest in a very, very long time), and heads upstairs. It’s a danger, trusting someone else, but that’s the way Magnus has always been.

\--

The room Cecily’s put him in is a modest affair, a far cry from his more luxurious lodgings on the moonbase. The floorboards are worn and creaky, covered by a rug with tattered tassels, and the bed looks like it’s seen better days. It’s the sort of room that most people would very politely call cozy, but it’s clean and it’s quiet, and for the first time in God knows how long, Magnus has a moment with just him and his thoughts. He exhales deeply, wrapping his hands around the back of his neck and bowing his head, and for the first time since he came here, feels an inkling of doubt.

What is he doing here, really? Is this the right thing to do? It’s so quiet in here, and he misses Taako, he misses Merle. Everything here is familiar, but it feels so strange, and -

_Look in the mirror_

He’s not sure why, but he finds himself looking up again, into the mirror, and he’s surprised by what he sees. This was only around five and a half years ago, but he looks so much _younger_ now. After a sudden impulse, he takes off his shirt and stands in front of the mirror, hands slowly rising to grip at his face, mapping out the differences. He’s lived a rough and tumble enough life as it is, sure, but all those years without Julia - those had been the hardest on him, etched out the most lines on his face. Now, they’re gone. Now, he looks like a man who’s taken better care of himself, someone who’s had someone to take care of him in return. All those years out on the road, traveling with caravans of people who really didn’t give a shit whether he lived or died turned into scars that added up over the years, scars he didn’t have anyone fussing over him for, or applying oil to them so they didn’t heal gnarled and ugly, still aching a little whenever his armour presses down on them. He glides his hands across his shoulder, where he used to have a big, nasty, gnarled web of a scar from an arrow yanked out too soon, down to his stomach where there ought to be a scar from a particularly bad blow with a rusting sword. He’s still plenty scarred - they fought in a revolution, after all - but it’s different. Now, he looks loved and well taken care of, like a man with a home, a wife, a life of his very own.

As he brings his hands up to touch his sideburns - shorter now, better kempt - he notes the glint of the ring on his finger, a simple ring that Julia had made herself, matching the ring he had carved for her in turn. He still had it, before, but kept it tucked away in a pouch, unwilling to lose it or have it be the reason he lost a finger. In the moment that he thinks to himself that he did the right thing, he catches a gleam of silver in the mirror and turns, only to see the Chalice sitting behind him on the end table. The Chalice at the Hammer and Tongs had made sense, but this?

He inhales, deep and slow, and walks over to pick it up. Feeling somewhat foolish, he says aloud: “June? Are you… following me?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it following you,” she says, voice cheerfully pleasant even as it rings inside his head. “You accepted me. If you’re going to keep this timeline alive, you need me. We’re changing things together.”

“Right. Right, of course, that makes sense.” He swallows, toying a little with the Chalice, gliding his fingertips over its ridges. It’s a marvelously well designed cup, he realizes for the first time. Whoever did this was craftsman, with more in mind than just the sheer power behind the Chalice. “And this - this is how it’s supposed to work? I’m doing the right thing?”

“Whatever you do is the right thing to do. This is your world now, Magnus. I’m just here helping you make it so.”

That sounds like a terrifying amount of responsibility in the moment, and as if able to sense his unease, June adds on, “Julia is very beautiful.”

What’s he supposed to say to that? “Yes. She is.”

“You ought to wash up now. Cecily will be here any minute.”

She’s right, of course, and Magnus tells her as much as he sets the Chalice down. Then, as if thinking better of it, he takes the Chalice and hides it away in his traveling pouch, somehow worried that Cecily would know and try to take it for - for some reason he can’t really figure out yet, but - no, no, it makes sense that he wants to keep it safe, he needs it to keep this timeline whole. It’s fine. It’s all fine. He should wash up now.

So he does.


	3. Chapter Three

By the time Cecily makes her way up to Magnus’ room, he’s cleaned himself up with the basin made available to him (it’s a far cry from the Bureau’s showers, seemingly endless hot water courtesy of Lucas, and he hadn’t realized how accustomed he’d gotten to the technology there), and his hair’s still damp, shirt still clinging to him where he didn’t towel himself off properly.

When she walks in, she makes a big show of sniffing that makes Magnus smile before thumping him on the shoulder in a friendly sort of way and exclaiming, “Now, that’s an improvement! You just smell like mothballs now, but everything in this place smells like mothballs. Go on! Bed, sit! We don’t need to stand and talk like animals.” 

Wordlessly, he sits on the bed, and she yanks the wooden chair forward, legs squeaking against the wooden floor, and sits in it backwards. “You’re a lot less chatty than I heard you were.”

“It’s been a long day. I wouldn’t believe everything you hear, either.”

“Well, I don’t see why not. They weren’t wrong about the sideburns, Burnsides.” She grins again, smile wide and gap-toothed. Magnus can’t help but like her. “Anyway, let’s move on, hmm? I heard from Carlos - you know, the dwarf you spoke to earlier? The ferrier? He said you asked him about the Governor.”

“I just wanted - I just want closure,” he says. It’s not a lie.

“Sure you do. Thing is, that’s what we want too. That other inn I was telling you about across town - the Bronzed Philosopher’s Inn?”

Magnus raises a brow.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Damned silly name. I suppose they think it’s fancy. The place has gotten real gussied up lately. Real carpet on all the floors, everything’s all… gilted, or whatever. Class traitors, that’s what they are, sucking up to elite. I’d spit, only I don’t want to clean my floors again, and you probably wouldn’t appreciate it, eh, Hammer?” 

“Magnus,” he corrects, then, as if buoyed by Cecily’s cheerfulness, chuckles, “and I’m sure I’ve slept in worse, but I’d rather not sleep in your spit.” 

“Fair’s fair, fair’s fair. You’re waiting for me to get to the point, right? Point being, Magnus, that’s where Kalan’s been for some time now.”

Magnus feels his mouth go dry. “Is that so?”

“That’s right. Meeting up with gods know who, swinging his weight around like he’s the one that won the battle. He tries to keep it hush-hush, but anyone that’s someone knows that he’s squirreled himself away in there, planning something. We don’t want him here either. We want him gone. And when you rolled into town, well… you got rid of the whelp once, didn’t you?”

“That I did,” Magnus says, a touch distantly, and he looks down at where his hands are rested in his lap, fingers all bunched together. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why do you want him gone? I mean, what’s he doing here that’s got you guys all worked up?” He shouldn’t ask, he knows. He should just thank her for the information, do what must be done, and carry on his merry way to the rest of his life. 

“A man like that doesn’t change, that’s why. We’ve got our own Governor to deal with, and we don’t need some foul-tongued beast whispering suggestions into his ear, greasing the pockets of anyone who’ll listen. You may have won that revolution, but there’s no saying we’d do the same, certainly not with the mercenaries that keep on going in and out of that place. That and I’ve got bills and that damned inn’s taken all my business away,” she adds on with a bark of harsh laughter. “I’m a businesswoman after all. And now it’s my turn to ask you a question.”

“Sure.”

“Why the change of heart? No -- no, no, sweetheart, don’t even bother denying it. People only ask around in the shadows if they want to kill someone or fuck them, and it looks to me like you’re a married man. Last I heard, you made the choice not to kill him. Said he wasn’t even worth your sweat.”

“That’s not exactly what I said,” Magnus says slowly, but that’s the way of rumours, that’s the way of symbols and big names and the nebulous title of a folk hero. He remembers being that young, and how foolish he’d been to think that if you just let someone go, they would have the good sense to carry on a quiet life of relative virtue. “You’re right. People like that don’t change. He’s going to do something else - something terrible, and I need to stop him. And Cecily - this is important.” 

“Yes?”

“No one can know it was me. I mean it. As far as you’re concerned, and Carlos, and anyone else who’s been talking, I slept here all night, and went on to Neverwinter.”

“Or what?”

Magnus stares at her for a moment, eyes as wide as dishes, brain stalling. He’s not a natural killer, and he sure isn’t a natural at threatening people who’ve done nothing to deserve it either. Or what? WHat does he say to that? But Julia can’t know, she’ll know that’s not like him, she’ll know something was --

Cecily bursts into laughter that’s not altogether kind. “Oh, sweetheart, the look on your face! Don’t you worry, I just wanted to see how different you were from the stories. Not that different, it seems.” She reaches out and pats his hand. “I won’t tell a soul. None of us will, not when you’re doing us a favour. Now, you’ll want to wait out in the back alley of the Bronzed Philosopher. He’ll stagger out for a smoke or to puke his guts out eventually, and then you’ll have him.”

Magnus lets out a deep breath. “Thank you. Really, I can’t - I can’t tell you how much this needs to be done.”

“Just do the job, and we’ll be square. And take care of that handsome husband or pretty wife of yours back home, won’t you?”

That much, he knows he can promise. Nothing’s ever going to happen to Julia again. Just thinking of her, knowing that he’ll see her in eleven days -- that will make this all worth it. As soon as he kills Kalan, wins the competition, and goes back home, it’ll be like nothing ever happened, and this knot in his gut that’s not going away will finally unwind.

“I will.” 

“Good. You do whatever it is big men do when they’re gearing up,” she says, flapping her hand at him in a way he thinks is just expressive until a fire in the hearth before him magically lights up, a move that would have amazed him before he met a different elf who burned spell slots like they were going out of style, “and I’ll be sure to come back and make sure you’re headed in the right direction.”

After she leaves, Magnus grabs his pack to go through what he’s got inside to work with. It’s not great, if he’s being honest with himself. Later on in his life, he’ll have enough gear to fuck up anyone who crosses him, but right now? He’s got his handaxe, he’s got small dagger, he’s got his carving tools, and that’s about it. None of them are meant for fighting, not really. They’re all just tools of the trade.

But that’s how they won the revolution, isn’t it? You get a bunch of craftsmen who are all _very_ good at their job, and you’d be surprised at how efficiently they can wield their brands and cast iron pans, their axes and scythes and shovels, their carving tools and welding tools. They had already been filled with directionless rage, and all they needed was some directing to the right target. 

Magnus doesn’t do a whole lot else of prep work before night falls and it’s time to go. He slips on the rust-coloured cloak that Julia had made sure he brought in case of rain, slips the hood over his head, makes sure his pack is full and ready to go, and heads downstairs. Cecily leads him ‘round the back and offers him one of her own horses - Magnus’ own rented horse is in the stable, having a hard-earned rest after the long day’s ride - and points him in the right direction. Just wait, she tells him, and Kalan will come eventually.


	4. Chapter Four

As it turns out, he didn’t need Cecily’s detailed instructions. He can spot the Bronzed Philosopher from a mile away - _anyone_ could. It has silver, bronze and gold fused to its exterior in a slapdash sort of way, telltale signs of age and wear and tear beneath them, and the added carvings to the exposed wood is elaborate but as gaudy as all get out. It’s the sort of design that some of Magnus’ more ambitious customers used to come to him with, and the sort of design he gently leads them away from. It reeks of new, unexpected wealth, and an eagerness to show it off. The inside is brightly lit, filled with magic and large torches alike, and Magnus can’t quite resist peeking through the window to see exactly what’s going on in there.

The inside isn’t much classier than the outside. There are a couple of bronzed statues in there, at odds with the rest of the originally rustic decor, and the whole place is filled with the stench of cigar smoke and freely flowing liquor and, Magnus notices, an awful lot of gambling. He can’t see Kalan quite yet, but he sees quite a few men and women that may as well be him, cloaked in finery and decked out in expensive jewelry, surrounding themselves with beautiful men and women and, Magnus notices, more than a few seedy looking individuals. He’d been a mercenary long enough to know that his own kind is in there. Are those the men that helped Kalan set up his bombs? Magnus wonders. Or did he want the personal touch of doing it himself?

He’s still in the midst of wondering when the bartender - and presumably owner - of the location spots him. Cursing, Magnus ducks, but he doesn’t move quickly enough to escape his attention altogether.

The man swings the door open and says, loudly, “We don’t welcome beggars here! This is a pre-sti-gi-ous establishment we got here, and we don’t need seedy folks like you just hanging about!” 

“No, I’m not a --”

“Don’t you worry, sirs and ladies, I’ll be dispensing of the rubbish! If you want to beg, you can do it at the Great Bear, where people like you belong.” The bartender shuts the door behind him and steps towards Magnus, who ducks his head out of sheer desperation not to be recognized, but to his surprise, the bartender flicks a gold piece at him instead. 

The bartender is a half-orc fellow, hair neatly gelled back, new rings on his fingers, and an expensive fur ruff around his neck. “Go on, get. This will buy you a crust of bread, at least.”

Magnus doesn’t say anything.

“What, you don’t speak common?”

Magnus grasps onto the reprieve that’s been offered to him by speaking hastily in Elvish, “ _No, I don’t. Thank you._ ”

“Brrrreeeeeaaad.” The man takes the gold piece out of Magnus’ hand, and waves it in his face, speaking slowly and methodically, as if he thinks that Magnus is a half-wit instead of someone who simply doesn’t know Common, which is as good a cover as he’s going to get. “Gooooooold. Go. Buy. Bread. Go. Away.”

Magnus just ducks his head again and, shoulders hunched against the rain, ducks into the back alley. A peal of laughter sounds from out of the inn as the door swings open and shut again. It’s terribly easy to judge but, Magnus thinks, staring down at the gold piece, not everyone in there is like Governor Kalan. Maybe the fellow Cecily is so worried about is nobody, not a despot, just a selfish little man in a world full of selfish little men. 

But he knows the measure of one of those men, at least, and he can stop tragedy before it ever comes. 

\--

Magnus had dreamed of killing Governor Kalan for a very long time. In those first few months, ducking in and out of shitty bars and getting even shittier jobs and drinking way too much shitty beer, that thought had been what kept him going. Where and how it happened had always changed, but there were a few constants. He would surprise the man, when he felt as safe as Magnus once had in Raven’s Roost, and in his eyes, he would see the bitter realization of a man who knew how many eyes he had ruined. _You…!_ Kalan may have exclaimed. Maybe he would even try to make a deal - oh, how Magnus wanted him to try to bribe him, only to learn that there are some things money can’t buy.

But in the end, no amount of pleading or bargaining would sway Magnus. He would kill the man, looking him straight in the eye, and say _this is for Julia_. Kalan would die, knowing that he had earned that death, knowing that he had done something so unforgivable that not a soul alive would want to spare him for it.

It was a nice dream. A dream that he had taken out less and less frequently once he joined up with the Bureau, too busy learning a different sort of happiness to dwell too much on a quest for vengeance that had started so long ago, but a nice dream nevertheless. He feels odd, finally having the chance to bring it to fruition, and he can’t quite shake that tense feeling in his chest, the strange uncertainty that’s growing within him.

He doesn’t have long to ponder the fact, because just as Cecily told him he would, Governor Kalan steps out of the back door of the inn. He’s a horrifyingly normal looking man, all things considered, tall and thin with graceful features and an imperious brow, a well-kept goatee and eyes bright with intelligence. If Magnus didn’t know him, he might have stepped forward to see if he could help him as he leans against the wall of the inn, steps unsteady from too much drink. Kalan hacks a cough into his shoulder - he doesn’t even see Magnus there, but then again, he always did have a strange blindness that applied only to commoners - and rummages around in the inside of his jacket for one of his clove cigars, too pungent for any man to smoke in lodgings he wished to stay in. 

Magnus’ indecision lasts only a moment, and Kalan’s enchanted lighter falls to the ground and fizzles out in a puddle beneath their feet as he strides forward, grabbing Kalan by his face, large hand wrapped firmly around his mouth to muffle his scream of alarm, and he slams the back of his head into the wall. The force of it dislodges Magnus’ hood, and Kalan’s eyes widen in surprise, but that’s all Magnus sees in them: fear, surprise, questioning bewilderment. He has none of the satisfaction of seeing Kalan knowing what he’d done, and he finds all the words he’d planned to say turning to ash in his mouth. Kalan just struggles, fingernails scrabbling at Magnus’ hand and drawing blood in his desperation. He looks confused, and terrified. They’re the eyes of a man who knows that he’s going to die. 

Before he loses his nerve, Magnus grabs his knife and slits Kalan’s throat in one smooth, decisive motion, stepping out of the way of the ensuing spray of blood and allowing Kalan’s corpse to fall in a heap on the ground. It feels unsatisfying, but more than that, it feels _wrong_. Kalan deserves to die for several reasons, but - but he’d never expected it to go like this, not this easy, not without him doing anything, not without justice buoying him forwards. Magnus is a killer and has been for a while, there’s no getting around that, but he’s not and has never been a _murderer_.

That’s what this is. It’s murder. Deserved murder, certainly, but murder nonetheless, and that hole in him that he thought could be filled with Kalan’s death remains an open wound, waiting for justice that will never be granted to him. As the stench of blood fills the small alleyway, Magnus feels nausea rise in his gut and he stumbles backwards, hand searching at the wall beside him for purchase, and the world moves.

That’s not a metaphor. With an enormous ringing noise in his ears and a feeling of unease not dissimilar to that of standing in the Bureau prior to inoculation, the world moves, and Magnus watches -- 

_\-- Kalan is standing in the alley again, adjusting the pin on his cloak as he drops a pouch of gold in the hands of the leader of a group of mercenaries. “I don’t care how you do it or what you take,” he says, “but get the job done. If you don’t kill the Burnsides, you’re not getting the other half of the gold.” The mercenaries sneer and --_

_\-- The half-orc bartender is meeting with the local officials, eyes large and red from crying, wringing his hands in front of him as the woman in charge says, archly, “If you don’t cooperate with us about what you’ve been carrying on doing here, we’ll have no choice but to shut the place down,” and Magnus remembers that he had been brusque, but not unkind, and --_

_\-- Magnus sees himself before him, unmoving in front of Kalan’s corpse until the officials arrive, and he allows himself to be carted away without any protestation, the cloak that Julia had packed for him still stained with blood_

_\-- He sees himself, letting Kalan go, unable to strike that killing blow, and Kalan steps back with a sneer and spits, “What is this, Burnsides, an assassination? You don’t have that in you--”_

_\-- He sees eyes and eyes and eyes out of nowhere, a darkness encroaching on his vision he doesn't know how to quantify or describe, as though an unknown force is lying in wait, judging his every move, and --_

It doesn’t stop, and Magnus doesn’t know what to do in it until he suddenly feels a heavy weight materialize in his bag. Harried, he falls to his knees and digs frantically through his bag until he sees exactly what he expected: the Chalice.

“What’s happening?” He yells at it, shaking it before him. “You never told me about _this_! Tell me what’s going on!” 

"I told you everything," June replies, although even she sounds a little worried. "I told you to keep this timeline alive, you have to want it. If you stop wanting it, there’s nothing I can do to keep this timeline from disintegrating. You’re seeing other timelines. That’s all."

Magnus squeezes his eyes shut, but still, he hears that interminable ringing. “Just tell me how to fix this. I need to fix this."

"You need to want this, Magnus. Think about what you have waiting back home. Think about Raven’s Roost." 

It’s not enough. It’s not enough, and Magnus can feel it in the rocking underneath his knees, but then June says: _Think about what you came home to last time you went to the carpentry competition._

And just like that, Magnus remembers that horrible race home, digging desperately through debris until his hands were bloodied and raw, searching for hope, or confirmation, or gods, just a body to bury. The despair had near swallowed him whole. When he opens his eyes again, the ringing’s stopped, replaced only with the patter of raindrops against the cobblestones and muffled voices raised in merriment from inside of the inn. And Kalan, Kalan’s corpse is still lying there. He’s in the right timeline. He’s in the timeline where he gets to save Raven’s Roost.

He leans against the wall, tasting sick in his mouth and breathing as hard as though he ran a marathon instead of pulling off the easiest kill he’s ever done. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back against the wall, just trying to catch his bearings. “That was awful.”

"It is in your power to stop this from ever happening again. You must be stronger, Magnus. You know what you’re doing is right." 

“Yeah. Yeah.” He rubs at one of his eyes with his knuckle, taking a moment to convince himself of that fact. He did the right thing. Kalan deserved to die for all that he had done before, and it had only been Magnus’ own naivete that stopped him from killing him when he ought to have. This is still justice, just of a delayed sort.

He runs the half a block to where he’d left Cecily’s horse, and rides home, trying not to think too hard about that coppery stench that clings to him despite the rain’s best efforts to wash it all away. Cecily’s standing at the stables, waiting for him at the Great Bear Inn, anxiously gnawing on what had been a well-manicured nail, and she lights up once she sees him.

“Hello, Burnsides! Did it go -- oh.”

She knows how it went from the blood still underneath his fingernails, it seems, but even she can’t keep up her unflappable cheerfulness in the face of Magnus’ expression.

“Give me your clothes,” she says, voice uncharacteristically gentle from the admittedly brief time that Magnus has known her for. “I’ll make sure they’re good and clean by the time you leave in the morning. You did the right thing. You did, didn’t you?”

All Magnus can manage is a sharp, staccato nod. “Yeah. Thanks, Cecily. I’m going to -- I’m just going to go. Upstairs.”

Once he gets back to his room, he puts his dirty clothes in the bag Cecily had provided him with and leaves them out in the hallway as instructed before washing up the best he’s able. After that, he just sits on the bed, pointedly avoiding looking at the mirror, and takes the Chalice from out of his bag. It feels heavy in his hands, heavier than it did before, and he turns it over as if able to glean answers from just looking at it.

“June…”

"You do know I’m not June, don’t you?" 

“I’m not calling you Cup.”

"June it is." 

“If I don’t want this enough, what will happen?”

"I can’t say." 

“Can’t, or won’t?”

"Can’t. Nobody’s been able to use me before, not like this. You’re the only one with the strength to. If you can’t keep that strength up, I can’t promise you what will happen from here on." 

It’s not the answer Magnus had wanted, but it’s the one he’d half been expecting. “All right. Thank you.”

"It is hard now, but it will get easier. It always gets easier." 

Without anything left to say to her, Magnus puts the Chalice down on his bedside table, feeling oddly comforted by its proximity, and lies flat on his bed.

She’s right, is the last thing that he finds himself thinking before slipping into an uneasy slumber. It gets easier. It always does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops! apparently I forgot that I have June speak in quotation marks for this chapter and this chapter only. That should be fixed now! This part was a bit tricky to figure out how to write, but hopefully I'll get a better handle on it as we keep moving on forward. c:


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, everyone! SOMEONE (griffin) retconned what I wrote, so I had to do some tinkering.
> 
> (but thank you, griffin, the new backstory IS more interesting)
> 
> The next two chapters are just table-setting because I'm in love with the slow burn, but we should get things going soon enough. Thank you to the lovely people who've been commenting, and I hope you enjoy this!

As it turns out, tomorrow _is_ better. Magnus still feels a bit unsettled about Governor Kalan’s death, but when he gets up and looks out the window, the sun has still risen, and he still has one last task to do before he can finally settle down to his happy ending. He packs up his things, gives the Chalice a little pat for good luck for reasons he can’t quite figure out and doesn’t care to figure out, and heads downstairs to where he sees Cecily waiting for him.

“You’re up bright and early.”

“Got a long day’s ride ahead of me. I did tell you about the carpentry competition, right?”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “No shit! You’re actually going to that? And here I thought you already finished what you came here for. Good thing I got your stuff nice and cleaned up. Stay here - I’ll be right back.”

She ducks into the back and re-emerges with a bag that she tosses over to him. He catches it, and weighs it in his hands, noting its weight. 

“A little token of thanks.”

Magnus feels dirty all of a sudden, like the sort of mercenary he’d sworn not to be, because he only took jobs to _protect_. He didn’t do this for thanks, he didn’t do this for money, he did this because it had to be done. “No, I didn’t - I won’t accept your --”

“Boy, you sure are a stick-in-the-mud.” She leans across the counter, laughing at him. It doesn’t sound altogether kind, but the people Magnus has learned to love most in this world have a way of not sounding altogether kind when their actions tell a different story. “It’s not money, you half-wit. You really think I have gold to spare? Working _here_?”

Wordlessly, Magnus opens the bag, and sitting on top of his clothes as innocuous as anything, is a bag of food. It looks good. Smells good, too, better than any of the bland, hardy food he’d packed himself for the road. Feeling very foolish indeed, he closes the pack and offers her a sheepish smile. “Oh. Thank you.”

He leave shortly afterwards, and to his frank surprise, June was right. It _did_ get easier from here. No matter how much that sense of something being wrong sticks in his gut, no matter how many times he looks behind him, half expecting one of Kalan’s goons to come racing down the road to try to kill him, half expecting the militia to come from the other side to arrest him (and while Julia being alive would be a happy ending, being stuck in jail isn’t a great happy ending), but they never come. Eventually, he rides his horse a little easier, stopping at little towns here and there for a sleep and a wash, but he’s greeted with only benign words and affable smiles, none of them suspecting that he had blood on his hands just a few nights ago.

Most of his time is spent in solitude, though - well, _relative_ solitude. Some nights, with nothing to occupy his buzzing mind but whittling, he chats with June. He never expected a Relic to have much of a personality at all, but June’s got it in spades. Magnus likes most people, so it shouldn’t be as much of a surprise as it is that he likes her, but he does. In those nights, telling her stories of the past and hearing her act as though any of it is a surprise to her in her sweet, ringing voice, it’s hard for him to remember a time that he ever thought that she could be dangerous. There is a sharpness to her, to be sure, but it’s nevertheless difficult to see how someone so sweet could ever be capable of the horrors he’d seen from the other Relics.

When he makes it to the carpentry competition, he’s finally starting to feel at ease again. He wanders the place, awestruck at how familiar it all is. He remembers his first time here, charging forward with the sort of elation of a man who had not yet suffered such a monumental loss, gleefully chatting with carpenters who had worked at their craft for so much longer than him, delighting in meeting new people and learning new things, marveling over everything from the tiny, exact carvings in a dainty bassinet to the glossy enameled finish on canoes so long they required two carts strapped together haphazardously to make it here. He’s older now, and less easily impressed, so he takes his time looking at others’ displays but mostly stays to himself. 

As he returns to his chair (which was and remains a _damn good chair_ ), he hears the voice of an elderly gentleman behind him say, “Are you one of the carpenters here?”

He wasn’t expecting such an innocuous question give him a start, but it does. It feels like a lifetime since someone has called him a carpenter. Since the demise of Raven’s Roost, he’d become known mainly as a sellsword or a mercenary and, of course, a Reclaimer to a select few. It hammers home what a permanent change this is, what a different road he’s walking down. It reminds him of how he got here in the first place.

\----

When he got to Raven’s Roost, he wasn’t really intending to stay. He just knew that he wanted a place to rest his head for more than a few nights at a time, maybe even find a stable sort of job he could sustain for a season’s worth of work before moving on like he always does. He could have chosen any place, but Raven’s Roost, built up high in the sky, the air always fresh and bracing, the people brusque in a friendly, honest sort of way, had thoroughly charmed him. He had still been biding his time, looking out for someone that needed help with some heavy lifting when he met Steven at a fair, showing off his wares.

He couldn’t help but become attracted to what Steven had been showing off, not just the big, sturdy pieces of furniture, but the dainty little knick knacks Magnus was always buying but never had any use for. And these knick knacks were carved with the sort of careful dedication he hadn’t seen for a very long time, he had thought, running his fingers over the smooth surface of a carved duck, mouth open in a silent quack.

“That’s an odd one to pick out,” Steven had said with a low chuckle, and Magnus jerked his head up, almost embarrassed.

“I like it! It’s cute.” He turns it over in his hands, checking underneath it for all the little details a craftsman like Steven would slip in. “And _very_ well made.”

“You know what you’re looking for.” It was a kind thing to say, and quite possibly one in service of making a sale, but when Magnus looked into Steven’s open, warm expression, he felt the odd urge to share.

“My Dad was a carpenter. He taught me what I oughtta be looking for with stuff like this.” 

“Ah. And is that what you do as well?”

Magnus had laughed, then, he remembers the way he’d laughed, like being anything other than what he was was impossible. “No! No, not a chance. My old man taught me the basics, of course, but after that…” His father had been a good father, or at least a mediocre one, but he had mostly left Magnus to his own devices and hadn’t bothered pushing teaching him much of anything once he’d lost interest. “I was a hard kid to teach.”

He was. He could never sit still, and had little patience for people talking at him, lecturing him about what to do or how to do it. He’d always had too much energy, and too few places to get it out, and while he wouldn’t listen when he was inside, it was worse outside, where he was always getting into fights and sheepishly slinking home with a black eye or a split lip for his mother to silently mop up after. He can’t blame his folks for not bothering after a certain point. Magnus sure as hell wouldn’t have been able to deal with a younger version of himself at their age either. It had been easier just to let Magnus get all of that energy out of his system, no matter how he did it, and leave him to his own devices. After all that, it probably wasn't a huge surprise to them that he hit the road as soon as he was able to.

“So what is it that you do now, lad?”

Magnus had shrugged, then, knowing that his life was an unquantifiable one, spent aimlessly roaming from city to city, taking on odd jobs where he could find them without any particular sense of camaraderie or belonging. He’d make friends, sure, but they would be temporary ones, for a night of rowdy drinking and merry making before they went on to guard some other wagon of cargo or do heavy lifting for some other craftsman. “Whatever I can get. I was thinking about finding some work here for the season, maybe help out with a few chores, or some heavy lifting.”

He’s not sure to this very day what Steven had been thinking that day. Maybe he had seen a kindred spirit in Magnus. Maybe he’d just felt sorry for him, this rough and tumble man without any direction. Maybe he just really needed the help and decided that the right man for the job was the one who had biceps roughly the side of his head. Whatever the reason, Steven had given him a long, assessing look and said, “If that’s the case… my daughter’s off to school for the summer, and I could use a hand with the sweeping up and deliveries. If that’s something you’d be interested, you just ask anyone where The Tong is, and they’ll set you in the right direction.”

Magnus had bought the duck, thanked him profusely, and showed up at his door the very next day. All he had done was the sweeping up and deliveries for a while, just as promised, but he’d steal away scraps of wood to whittle away at, squinting at the duck figurine that he’d purchased from Steven (or Mr. Waxman, as he had called him back then), and trying his damnedest to replicate it. Somewhere down the line, Steven took pity on him and started showing him the ropes, always letting him know that he had potential whenever he said, in a moment of discouragement, that he wasn't cut out for stuff like this. Magnus had spent his whole life protecting others and rushing headlong into danger, knowing how to shield and knowing how to hurt, but this was the first time he could recall that anyone took the time to show him that he could _create_. With nothing more than the proper tools, a bit of wood, his own two hands and his mind (which he had never before put too much stock in; thinking was for other people), he could make something out of nothing. He could be useful. Even when he wasn’t being useful, he could make something whimsical and beautiful, little, delicate pieces that people would look at, then look at him in surprise, as if to say _those huge hands made this little thing?_ It hadn’t been an easy task, especially not when all of the other skilled carpenters had started when they were young and not well into adulthood, but Steven seemed to have an endless fount of patience and seemingly effortless kindness, a kindness that Magnus only knew how to repay in kind by taking carpentry as seriously as he took any of his missions.

It had been more than an awakening. It had been a revelation, even before Julia came back from school and strolled into his life like she had always belonged there. Steven had given him a more precious gift than he could have ever imagined.

But after he had died, being a carpenter just didn’t seem right. Hunkering down to make The Hammer, labouring quietly and building chairs and bedframes just seemed hollow, meaningless without his partner, so he became a sellsword once more, leaving the act of creation for little more than whiling away the hours on long journeys.

After Steven died, he’d forgotten how much his craft had meant to him. Now that he’s rewound time, maybe it can mean something to him again.

\----

“Are you one of the carpenters here?” The elderly man repeats himself, voice louder now, more insistent.

“Oh!” Magnus jumps, then turns around. Oh, shit. Right. The judges. “Yes! Yes, I am! Sorry, I was, uh… thinking.” He offers his hand to the judge. “I’m Magnus Burnsides of the Hammer and Tong - of Raven’s Roost. This, uh, this - this is my chair.”

“I can see that, Magnus Burnsides of the Hammer and Tong of Raven’s Roost,” the judge says, looking amused, and gets to work inspecting this chair. He’s very thorough. He even leans in to smell it. Eventually, he says, “It’s a very well made piece, there’s no doubting that. Pity about this scuff, though - your rider should be a little more careful!”

Magnus leans over to see where the chair is scuffed, right on the left corner where he had carelessly thrown the chair in the cart, more focused on killing Kalan than on preserving his work. Oops. 

But the scuff doesn’t mean much in the long run, because by the end of the day, Magnus is in possession of a certificate that deems him a Master Carpenter. He doesn’t feel the same sort of boundless joy he’d felt at the title when he first received it. He does, however, spend the rest of his ride home with his mind abuzz of all the different things he can make now that he has time to focus on his art, to really make something great, and make everyone else happy doing it. It’s not like saving the world, sure, but this is something he can do for himself.

He deserves that much, doesn't he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This bit with Steven has nothing to do with the plot and is ENTIRELY gratuitous, but I like writing backstory, and I wanted Magnus' relationship with Steven to have some sort of context, considering most of his current-day interactions will be with Julia. So I wrote it anyway!


	6. Chapter Six

When Merle opens his eyes, all he sees is white. For a moment, he’s torn between thinking that Magnus just severely fucked things up more than he had anticipate and thinking that he’s finally died for good this time when he hears Taako stirring beside him. Taako then sits up and yelps, “Shit!”

Merle is almost too tired to sit up to see what Taako’s making a ruckus about. He sits up anyway, grumbling under his breath as only dwarves of a certain age know how to, and then gets the rest of the way up in a hurry. They’re back in the white space, because they’re back with Istus who, it must be said, looks none too happy.

He does what he does best, which is dive back down into a bow as he frantically begins, “Oh, mighty Istus…!” When beside him is nothing but empty space, his eyes dart towards Taako who he gestures to join him. Taako doesn’t, because Taako’s not the sort to bow even in front of a very, very angry looking God. It’s something that others would find admirable, but Merle’s been around long enough to just consider it foolish, because he’s halfway convinced that they’re about to get smote. 

“That won’t be necessary, Merle,” Istus says, grabbing her scissors and snipping another strand of yarn in a decidedly unpleasant way. Merle entertains the idea of telling her that while he appreciates the metaphor, that’s not really how you knit (he’s a crunchy guy, of _course_ he knows how to knit), but decides to err on the side of self-preservation for now. “I’m sure you’re both wondering what’s going on.”

“No shit!” Taako says, and while Merle isn’t about to say the same words, he can’t help but nod along.

“I must admit, when you agreed to do my bidding, I didn’t _actually_ expect one of you to betray my one and only tenet mere minutes after pleading fealty.”

“That was Magnus! That wasn’t us! It was Magnus!” Merle immediately protests, more than happy to throw Magnus under the fantasy bus. “ _We_ held up our side of the deal! Isn’t that right, Taako?”

“Sure is!”

“Yes,” Istus says, looking as though she would be massaging her sinuses right about now if she was mortal. “You did. And I’m very proud of the both of you for not giving in, but that doesn’t solve our current problem. You can understand my position, as the God of Fate, yes? That literally changing the course of fate isn’t ideal, let’s say?”

“Right, right,” Taako says, crossing his arms and canting one hip. “But that wasn’t on us. I don’t see what we have to do with that.”

“You have everything to do with this. You see, Taako, Merle, this is not the way things are supposed to go. I need you to fix things. I fear that you two are the only ones with that ability.”

Merle and Taako exchange looks. Neither of them are really clear on what Magnus’ whole deal is (or was, as the case may be; both were pretty damn certain they’d never see the big lug again), but they knew that he made his choice for a reason. “It’s not that I don’t trust your judgment, O mighty Istus,” Merle says, hesitantly, “but what’s done is done. We don’t know where he is! We don’t even know what’s supposed to happen at this point! Isn’t the whole point of fate to just accept what’s happened and move on with it?”

“Not when fate has been supernaturally tampered with. I would not tell you to fix things without a plan. I can make an exception in this case, and send you back in time to when Magnus is now. You two, as his closest friends and comrades, must convince him to bring things back to the way things were.”

“Now hold on just a second,” Taako says. “We’re not shit to him! He threw away all of this to go change whatever it was he changed, and we’re supposed to somehow convince him to change it back after he’s already gotten what he wanted? No can do, lady. You’d have better luck going there and yanking him outta there yourself. In fact, I don’t see why you can’t just do that instead of getting _us_ to do it.”

When Merle looks over at Taako, there’s not a whole lot on his face beyond that breezy expression he always wears, but there’s a tightness to it that wasn’t there before that only those who have spent far too long learning Taako’s moods can know how to read. The kid’s not happy about Magnus ditching them after everything they’ve gone through, and Merle can’t blame him. He’s not too pleased about it either, even if he does understand the temptation of changing the past, and Pan knows he has no desire to rip Magnus away from what can ostensibly make him happy. “He has a point, you know.”

“Or,” Istus counters, “you can begin to live in a different timeline, one in which the course of fate has been unalterably changed. You can live in a world where you never meet Magnus Burnsides.”

“Well,” Merle says, equitably, “that way we won’t know what we’re missing, yeah? That doesn’t sound so bad. We what, go to the Bureau on our own, go on our merry way? Hell, I might even get to keep my arm in this timeline.”

Taako, on the other hand, is starting to look as though he’s realizing something. “You could keep your arm,” he says, slowly, “or you could totally Boyland it up, my man.”

“ _Ugh_ , not Boyland!”

“I mean dead, Merle!”

“Oh.”

“So what you’re telling us, Istus, is that either we go back and steal the Chalice, or we die, and so do the other, let’s say… ten people whose lives we’ve saved. Right?”

“Not necessarily,” Istus says, although she doesn’t seem particularly inclined to argue the point when they’ve talked themselves into doing her bidding, albeit for all of the wrong reasons. “But you will not have Magnus accompanying you through danger.”

They both know what that means. Magnus isn’t always the guy who solves the problem at hand - that tends to be Taako’s job - but he is the guy who makes sure everyone stays alive long enough to do it. Taako calls him his meat-shield sometimes in jest, but that’s not so terribly far from the truth when they get down to it. 

“Fuck the new timeline! Taako wants to live!”

Merle doesn’t want to put it quite like that so he says, magnanimously, “We would be happy to do your bidding, Lady Istus,” but what he really means is _yes, I too would really like to continue living_.

“If we are quite agreed…” Istus reaches out, grabbing a strand of yarn and starts to knit it into the scarf.

“Wait!” Taako says. “Don’t just drop us in there! We need some guidance, or something!”

“Like where do we find Magnus?” Merle asks. “It’s a big world out there. We don’t want to be wandering around for five years just trying to find the guy.”

“That’s a good thing, because you don’t have five years. I can give you half a year’s time before the timeline will revert, and you as you know yourselves will be lost to time, as will the remnants of this timeline. The help I can give you is limited, or else I would have solved matters myself. All I can tell you is that you can find Magnus in the town of Raven’s Roost, and that you are, underneath no circumstances, to change matters in your own pasts while you are there. There will be other versions of yourselves in this timeline who you should, of course, avoid. And that is all the time that we have. When you wake, you will be in a different time. I wish you luck.” She pauses, staring stonily at them over her knitting, and gives them one last piece of guidance: “Do not screw this up.”

And then everything goes white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now we get into how this'll be resolved... eventually! I'm definitely less comfortable writing Merle and Taako than I am Magnus, so please bear with me while I learn their voices. :)


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magnus comes home. He's in love, and that makes everything okay. 
> 
> Kind of.

Things had felt so strange with Governor Kalan that Magnus had half-expected something terrible to happen on the way home. For the world to crumple underneath his feet, perhaps, to be plunged back into the blinding whiteness of death because he didn’t have the resolve to get it together, for some militia to come chasing after him to lock him up in jail. 

None of that happens. It’s a quiet, peaceful trip back, pausing only at inns for food and drink, to give his horse a chance to rest before continuing on his way. All of the people are endeared by his rustic hospitality, and he exchanges nary a negative word on his way back to Raven’s Roost. Once he arrives at its entrance, staring up at those towers that spell out home, Magnus feels his stomach drop and blinks hard, wondering what to expect. It takes him a moment to realize that his hands are shaking, and he balls them up in tight fists. He remembers the wreckage and the ash, remembers running through it searching for something, anything to prove that he had ever lived here, a happy life with his wife. It takes him looking down at his fists to bring him back to the present, marveling at how smooth his hands still are. He had dug through the wreckage before, clawing his way through every bit he could manage until his hands were red with blood and his nails split, and still, he continued digging.

But the scars are all gone, and Raven’s Roost stands before him, whole as ever. He takes a deep breath, squeezes June’s handle for good luck - and he has found himself doing this at least once a day, these days, reassured by the way he can feel its power underneath his fingers, a confirmation that it’s still working - and rides in. When he gets back to the Hammer & Tongs, he’s relieved to see it in good shape, their chimney puffing away and all of the lights on in the workshop. There’s still a part of him that expects to see Julia and Steven dead at their desks, sprawled over in a heap, Kalan’s allies having subtler ways of dealing with their enemies than Kalan himself, but when he steps inside, he’s nearly bowled over by a Julia-shaped blur.

It’s like everything that’s bad just melts away. He laughs, arms circling her wide waist to lift her up in the air and spin her, kissing her as though he’d been gone for years, not less than a fortnight. 

“Hi,” she says.

He grins. “Hi.”

Behind them, Steven clears his throat. He’s as happy about their marriage as anyone else, but there’s limits to how much canoodling he wants to see. Julia’s hand holds tightly onto his as she steps a little further away, delight in her eyes. “You know, I was starting to wish I’d gone to that competition with you! It’s too quiet without you here. So? How did it go?”

“Good, else he wouldn’t be here,” Steven points out gruffly, wiping his hands off on a rag and tossing it aside. “What is it you said, Julia? Come back with your chair or on it?”

“It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now!” Magnus says brightly. “But I came back _with_ my chair.”

Steven and Julia stare at him blankly, because just as Magnus said, the analogy _really_ doesn’t work for carpentry contests. Magnus rubs at the back of his neck. “That means I won. I am officially a Master Carpenter!”

It’s been too long since it was first awarded to him for Magnus to feel any sort of pride in his handiwork, but he _does_ feel pride at the way Julia and Steven’s faces light up, even as Steven reassures him that he knew all along that he was going to win. “You two can have a master-apprentice moment,” Julia says, slipping on her shoes. “I’ll go make sure Nancy’s taken care of and bring the chair in.”

As she slips out, Steven tugs on his shoulder, getting him to lean down for a good, tight hug, then begins to slap at his back as he wheezes, “If you wanted to kill me, you could find a better way than squeezing me to death!” 

Magnus lets go.

“Got a grip like a vice, boy. And now that we’ve got all the mushy I’m-proud-of-you stuff out of the way, it’s time to talk work! “I hope you enjoyed your little break, because we’re full-up on work now, and our to-do list’s only going to get longer now that you’ve got a fancy piece of paper saying you’re actually good. Got it?”

“Got it.”

There’s a thump from outside as Julia kicks the door open - her hands are full of the chair, which is no mean feat; it’s big and a bugger to carry, but Julia’s always been strong in more ways than one - and sets the chair down in the corner right where it belongs. She whips off the tarp and collapses back in the chair, hands gripping the rests. “Now this is what I call an award-winning piece! I hope you’re ready for your baby to become just another piece of furniture… hold up, what’s this?” She rubs her finger against the scuff. “It got kinda bashed up, didn’t it? That’s not like you.”

“Hey, it’s not _just_ a piece of furniture if you’re the one in it,” Magnus says, not bothering to address the scuff (and really, how many people are going to point it out?), resting his hands on hers.

She laughs and rolls her eyes. “Look who’s the one not making sense. Come on, we’ve got time before you’ve got to get back to work. Right, Da?”

Steven nods and dismisses Magnus, sending them off on their way on a night out on the town. Magnus goes to bed that night in his small, cozy little home above the Hammer & Tongs, his wife sleeping soundly beside him, and the man he’s come to know as a father right down the halls. This is where he learned how to be happy, in nothing more than a modest apartment above a workshop, filled with a family, the people he loves most. How odd it seems later, a restless roamer roving from place to place, that at one time, his whole life was inside these four walls. And it is again.

Despite Magnus’ paranoia, he goes to night peacefully the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. Everything feels so fraught and fragile, but his life here has never been so steady and strong, he and Steven hard at work while Julia’s busy negotiating prices and handling the paperwork and the supplies. Eventually, he settles back into a routine, and stops staring so hard at unfamiliar hands. Eventually, he accepts happiness as the new normal.

It’s everything that June had said it would be. 

====

It doesn’t last. Magnus isn’t sure why he thought it would last, because even if everything around him is just the way he thought it would be, the way it’s supposed to be, there’s something inside him that’s still… broken. He wouldn’t have called himself broken back in his old timeline, not when he had real purpose for his occasional anguish, real cause for revenge and sorrow and anger, but here, with nothing to battle against, he’s still not content. It’s like despite the evidence around him that everything’s going to be okay, there’s something in his brain that’s still on high-alert, convinced that everyone he loves is in danger. How can he call that anything but broken, this sad imagined state causing him so much grief? 

More often than not, he finds himself waking up in a cold sweat, half-believing that somethings happened while he slept, that things have gone back to normal. On those nights, he’s apt to turn around and wrap his arms around Julia, only half-disturbing her sleep as she sighs and settles back into whatever happier things she’s dreaming about, the sorts of dreams he had before any of this had ever happened.

It’s not just the dreaming, though. It’s _everything_. When Julia gets up to leave the shop, he can’t help but ask after her, wondering where she’s going, who she’s seeing, when she’s going to be back. Maybe that’s okay for a husband to do - is it? For how truly his love for Julia had burned, and for all that her love for him had burned, they never got a chance to practice being a married couple, figuring out how to be husband and wife - but it’s never been the way they’ve done things before. He worries about Steven too, and everyone else in Raven’s Roost, constantly drawing maps of where everyone is in his head, strange imaginings filling his head every time he sits down to carve, scenarios that he’s never thought about before, scenarios that may yet never come to pass. What if there’s an accident? What if someone drops a shipment and becomes injured? What if Kalan’s men come back with poison to slip into the wares of the local fry shop, what if they come with knives, what if something terrible happens, and he’s stuck in a world where he only got an extra few weeks with the people he loves? So he needles and he asks and he pries, every single day, without fail, hoping that nobody will notice.

It’s not logical, it’s not rational, but every single time he finds himself thinking it, he can’t force himself to stop. He should be able to do it, but he just _can’t_. It’s not as though he’s trapped in a constant spiral of misery - quite the contrary; his moments of happiness are frequent and not at all fleeting, heart singing with joy - but it happens every day. He can’t fight his way out of this one. All he can do is push past it.

After one of those dreams, waking up with a start and drenched in sweat, Julia rubs at her eyes and turns around. Even with his heart hammering in his chest, he can’t help but notice how beautiful she is in the dim light, hair rumpled from sleep and expression groggy.

“Maggie…”

“It’s okay, Jules. Go back to sleep.”

She groans a bit as she sits up, nightgown scrunching up beneath her, hand reaching out to rest upon his cheek. “Not this time. It’s… what, the fourth one this week? What’s going _on_?”

“Nothing’s going on. They’re just dreams. It’ll pass, I promise. Being on the road for so long must’ve screwed with my sleep schedule, or something.”

She doesn’t look convinced. “Well, what are they about?”

“I can’t remember.”

"Nothing? Not even a little bit? It doesn't have to be from your last dream, but the one before, or the one before that."

"Sorry. No."

She doesn’t look convinced, but she doesn’t look like she knows what to say either. Magnus doesn’t like that expression on her, but he’s not about to tell her the grisly truth. “If you say so. Is there anything I can do to help? A hot drink, maybe?” Her hand slides down his cheek towards her chest, resting right over his heart. “Your heart’s still racing. Must have been one hell of a dream.”

Magnus leans forward and kisses her cheek, ignoring the way her nose scrunches up as his whiskers tickle her face. “No. Best thing you can do for me is stay right here.” He leans forward, wrapping his arms around her and burrowing his face into the crook of her neck, lowering them gently back upon their bed. She tangles her feet with his, and though she stays still and awake for longer than Magnus would like (he should never be the one keeping her up, unless it’s for the right sort of reasons), she eventually slackens and her breath slows as she falls asleep once more. Only then does Magnus close his eyes, secure in the idea that she’ll have forgotten about this by morning.


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fight!! Fight!! Fight!!
> 
> Okay, not much of a fight; they're not my forte. One more chapter left (it's about 95% done so the wait should be shorter) before we switch back to the dos horny boys!

He’s sitting in front of a dresser, carefully shaving thin strands of wood off of the decorative overhang when a voice breaks him out of his thoughtful stupor, a brown, speckled hand slapping down on the top of it.

“Not your best work, Magnus.”

“What?” Magnus glances over at where Steven settles himself down on a nearby stool, hands resting across his stomach. 

“You heard me. I’m not here to mince words with you. Ever since you got back, your work hasn’t been living up.”

Magnus may have been preoccupied with other things, but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped trying altogether. Being a carpenter, a damn good one at that, is a point of pride, a point of joy for him. He can’t say hearing this doesn’t sting. “Not everything I make is being submitted to a contest! This is just a dresser!”

“You don’t think everyone you work for deserves your best?”

Oof. And doesn’t he know _that_ look. Steven had a lot to deal with when Magnus first came in, full of piss and vinegar and defiance, and he’s learned over the years how to cow Magnus with a look. “Nossir.” 

“Good answer.” Steven takes off his glasses and takes a handkerchief from out of his front pocket, polishing the lenses in the same smooth, methodical motions with which he does everything else. “That’s only half of why I wanted to talk to you, but that half’s important. The work you put out represents more than just yourself - it represents _all_ of the Hammer and Tongs. You put out bad work, that reflects on me. And we’re not just carpenters - we’re craftsmen. We do it right, or not at all. You got that?”

Magnus looks at the dresser with a sigh, registering all of the small, stupid errors he can see there. They’re nothing that would stick out as being remarkably bad to anyone else - a nick there, a knob that’s just a millimetre off-centre, a carving where the line isn’t as clean and pure as it should be - but it matters to Steven. It used to matter to him. “I won’t let it happen again.”

Steven nods. “Right. Now that that’s over with - this isn’t like you Magnus. I _know_ it isn’t like you. You’ve been acting odd these days - erratic. Something’s bugging you, I just can’t put my finger on what.” He plants his hands on his knees and leans forward, eyes soft and kind behind his glasses. “We’re family now. You know that. If there’s something I should know about, you need to tell me.”

For the briefest of moments, looking at his face, Magnus feels like a young man again, feels like maybe things would be better if he could tell someone, especially someone he’s always admired as much as Steven, someone who bizarrely respects him in return. He swallows it down. “Just, uh… haven’t been sleeping great lately. Thanks, though. I’ll work on it.”

The gaze on him is a heavy one, full of quiet expectancy, but he doesn’t quail underneath it. “Well. As long as you know.” Steven gets up and places a hand on Magnus’ shoulder as he leaves, squeezing it firmly. “You let me know if you change your mind.”

Strike one, Magnus thinks to himself.

He gets back to work.

====

He works on it. He still has the dreams, still has his paranoia, still asks everyone where they’re going, and when, and with who, but sleepless nights or not, he makes sure his work is in tip-top shape. It’s good, in a way, to have something else to focus on, remember everything he loved about carpentry in the first place.

As it turns out, doing well at his job doesn’t exactly take away everything else that’s been going on. He thinks the day’s going well until he hears Julia’s footsteps rapidly approaching, a folder of papers in one hand to go sit at her desk, only she doesn’t sit at her desk. She walks past it, past Magnus, and towards the door, which is odd; she’s always working during these hours.

When she places one hand on the doorknob, Magnus knows he should keep quiet. She doesn’t want to tell him where she’s going every day, and she shouldn’t have to. She’s always been a fiery, independent sort, and that’s why he had fallen for her in the first place.

But the moment the door swings open, the tension growing in his chest takes a turn for the intolerable and he can’t help but bolt straight up, blurting out, “Where are you going?”

Her hands freeze at her sides. Her spine straightens until she’s brought herself to her full height. Then, like the frayed string of a violin that’s finally been sawed against one last time, she seems to snap as she whirls around, fire in her eyes. “Why?”

“I just want to --”

“No! _Why_ do you keep asking me that? Why are you acting so _weird_ all of a sudden? What, do you think I’m sleeping around behind your back? What exactly do you think I’m doing?”

“No! God, no, of - of course not, I’d never think that!” Magnus rallies, standing up with his hands held out in front of him as if calming a wild horse. “That’s not what I meant at all. I just…”

“I just what?”

Good question, Magnus thinks to himself, lowering his hands and mulling over the answer. “In case… something goes wrong. To protect you.”

“I can protect myself. I’ve protected myself years before I met you - taken care of Dad, too! I thought you liked that about me. I can’t have you - you asking me where I’m going and what I’m doing every second of every day! I tried not saying anything, but I can’t do it!” Red rises to the apples of her cheeks as she speaks, striding over to stand before him in three long strides, as spitting mad as he’s ever seen her. “I didn’t marry someone who would try to control me, and this, Magnus? I can’t be having this.”

“That’s not what I’ve been trying to do!”

"Then what are you trying to do?"

"I'm trying to keep you safe! You and everyone else! Protecting people, that's - that's my job!" He realizes that's a mistake as soon as he says it. That's not his job here, not anymore; he gave that up as soon as he decided to seize happiness instead of choosing to protect the world. Here, his only job is to be a good carpenter, to be a good neighbour, to be a good husband and a good son-in-law. To one day be a good father, though he hasn't dared think about that little conversation since he returned.

As she stares at him, her expression turns less angry, more crestfallen, though there’s still a good amount of heat in her gaze. She’s not the sort to let this go with a couple stammered excuses. "No. It's not your job, and _I'm_ not your job. I'm your wife. I’m leaving. Don’t follow me, and don’t ask me where I’m going. I need time to cool off.”

“Julia, wait - “

But he’s too late - or rather, Julia wasn’t going to wait no matter what he said. Magnus groans, scrubbing at his face with the heels of his hands and leans against the closed door and sinks to the floor. “Damn it.” He shakes his head. “Damn it!”

Strike two. 

====

Magnus isn’t actually sure what he does with the rest of his day. He tries to get back to work, but Steven’s words about providing quality keep ringing in his ears, and he knows that he can’t do good work like this. Instead, he paces the floor and does a whole lot of nothing, a part of him aching to just go down to the nearest pub and have a drink (or two, or four), but that will just make things worse. Besides, it’ll just remind him of the days after Raven’s Roost’s end, spent in a haze of ale and aimless rage. So eventually, he goes up to his room (their room) and his bed (their bed) and waits for Julia to come home. 

“That didn’t go well,” June says. Magnus stares listlessly at the cup on the bedside table.

“No,” he agrees, voice short. “But the world didn’t go sideways again.”

“That may be for the best. I’d have a lot of work ahead of me if the world were to… what was that you said? Go sideways? Yes, I would have a lot of work ahead of me if the world were to go sideways every time you had an argument.”

Magnus slams one hand on the bedside table, though he’s not sure why; it’s not as though the cup can _flinch_ , and he doesn’t want to intimidate her either. He’s just angry with himself, and he has nowhere to put it. “You’re not helping!”

“No. I suppose I’m not.”

Magnus buries his face in his hands, groaning. “What do I tell her? What can I tell her? I’ve fucked it up.”

“The truth.”

“Oh! Oh, I’ll just tell her the truth! Y’see, Jules, I’m from another timeline where everything went to shit, but I rewound everything with my magical cup! What's the cup do? We-ell, it's an evil relic that's supposed to end the world, and I grabbed it anyway!” He grabs the stem of the chalice, gripping it in front of him and staring at it, as though it will give him some sort of answer. The dramatic effect is a bit dampened by the fact that the chalice does, in fact, talk back.

“Fine. Not _the_ truth. _A_ truth. You can do this Magnus. You can. I believe in you. Your happy ending is here. You just need to smooth out a few bumps. If your love is strong enough to rewind time, it’s strong enough to weather this, too.”

Magnus sets the chalice back down and lies back on the bed. After a few minutes he finally speaks, voice muffled, “Sorry for calling you evil." 

"You're not wrong. I could be used for evil, in the wrong hands. In the hands of a good man, however..."

That thought doesn't quite track (he's a protector, he's supposed to be a protector, he's supposed to be protecting the world), but it's so much easier to believe her. It makes the Chalice all the more compelling, knowing that he is doing good, of a sort. He's doing good of a sort. He is. June says it's so, so it must be true. He exhales, long and slow. "Thank you." 

For a Grand Relic, he thinks, not for the first or for the last time, June’s an awfully sweet soul.


	9. CHAPTER NINE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hoo boy, how did we end up at Chapter Nine already? And without much significant plot? Well, here's some plot!
> 
> Nah, I'm joking, it's more meandering about, because I forgot that I'm a big ol' fluffmonster and could write domestic nonsense day in and day out without getting sick of it. 
> 
> So here, have some fluff, and a reconciliation and, like, an alarming amount of hand holding. Dos horny boys coming up next, and that's a promise!

Julia doesn’t come home for a long time, well past what curfew used to be, well past when she usually comes home. Magnus fights back the urge to go out on the town and find her. She’s fine, he tells himself over and over again, like it’s a magic spell. She’s fine, she’s just making a point, she’s fine, she’s _fine_.

Finally, he hears the door creak open and shut with a quiet click. Magnus doesn’t read too much into it, because even if Julia was still spitting mad, she wouldn’t go around slamming doors at this hour. It would wake Steven, and if there’s anyone she loves more than Magnus, it’s Steven. He braces himself as he listens to her footsteps climb up the stairs, but she doesn’t come into their room with a bang. Instead, she simply shuts the door behind her and sits on the edge of her side of the bed.

“Welcome home,” he says, quietly. He very pointedly does not ask her where she’s been.

She doesn’t respond, busying herself with shimmying out of her shirt and unclipping her bra, which she tosses on the ground in front of her before she twists and turns, stretching out her sore shoulders and cracking her back with a slow sigh. It would be a sight worth admiring on another day, Magnus thinks to himself, but now probably isn’t the time. It’s only after she’s out of her trousers and into a nightgown and after she washes her face and brushes her teeth that she sits back down on the bed again and deigns to speak. “I went out to submit our orders to the blacksmith and the lumber mill. After that, I went out with Maribelle. Went to her Ma’s restaurant out on the other side of town. You remember the one.”

“Did you have fun?”

“She’s sweet. So’s her Ma.” Julia drums her fingers on the edge of the bed.

“That’s good.” Magnus sits up too, resting his head against their plain headboard, fingers fidgeting in his lap as he tries to tease out the right words. She makes no effort to fill the silence. “Julia… about today. I’m sorry. You’re right, I can’t - it’s not fair to you. For me to do this. It won’t happen again.”

“You don’t have an excuse?”

Magnus shakes his head. “No. No excuses. Doesn’t matter what the reason is - it ain’t right.”

“I think this time… I _want_ an excuse.” Julia hands him a hair elastic and purposefully turns away from him. He gets the hint and kneels behind her, hands deftly smoothing through her hair and beginning to braid it. This is how they get some of their best talks done, when they’re not confronted with the tension of staring each other in the eye, and when Magnus can keep his hands busy like they ought to be. He always thinks better when he’s doing something else.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t want you to just stop doing - all of this. I want to know what’s going on. Does this have something to do with why you haven’t been sleeping? Those nightmares - the ones you claim you just can’t remember. You know that I don’t buy that. You have to know that.”

He keeps braiding her hair. Over-and-under. Over-and-under. “I know,” he mumbles.

“So _talk_ to me. Tell me what this is about.”

He can’t lie, but the truth is beyond him too. There’s too much and too little to say, all at once, and there’s a part of him that fears that his long pauses, his silence will make Julia think that he’s unwilling to tell the truth, that he just wanted to apologize so they could get it over with and move on. Julia knows him better than that, though, and even angry, there’s enough kindness in Julia’s heart to recognize when he’s struggling. “Start with the dreams.”

 _I dream of fire and ash,_ he thinks in some abstract way, unable to put words to it. He’s never been a skilled orator - that’s all Taako. And by the time he started having night terrors, real ones, nobody had been around to ask about them. Merle and Taako sure as hell didn’t. They just gave him a once-over in the morning, poured him a cup of coffee and let everything go, business as usual. Julia’s not like that. Julia likes to talk. Even more than that, Julia likes to listen.

He squeezes his eyes shut, pointer finger and thumb pinching the braid to keep his place. “I dream about bad things happening. To Raven’s Roost. To Steven.” He opens his eyes again, but he doesn’t look directly at her, not yet. “And to you. And I know - I _know_ they’re not real, I swear that I do. But I can’t - “ He waves one hand aimlessly around his temple, a sharp, quivering motion, then gets back to braiding. Over-and-under. Over-and-under. “I can’t get it out of my head. I’ve tried. I swear I’ve tried.”

“What do you think is going to happen, exactly? Kalan’s gone, and so are his lackeys. The only people that’re left are people that love you. They’d sooner raise arms to protect you than lift a finger to hurt you.”

That’s part of the problem. The people here, the good, strong, _noble_ people are people that he never had a chance to mourn. He had been so focused on his nearest and dearest that he had forgotten about the people he said hello to every day, the people he bought groceries from, the people who let him pet their dogs, the many wonderful, colourful people of Raven’s Roost, artists and lovers and craftsmen and labourers, people he had accepted as dead. Seeing them is like seeing a ghost for the first time and realizing you never quite looked at them properly while they were still alive. “I know that.”

“But?”

“There is no but,” he says, slowly. “It’s not - there _is_ no problem. Everything’s fine. Everything’s great! It’s not about you, or anyone else, it’s just - it’s me. It’s in me. Something just broke. And I can’t un-break it.” That’s what he’s been doing all along. Trying to glue the broken pieces of himself back where they were before Raven’s Roost was destroyed, bring himself back to the mindset of being a young man again, with nothing at all standing in his way. He ties the band around the end of her braid. “Done,” he says, as though they were talking about the weather and not about him being broken. 

It feels as though getting it off of his chest should make him feel lighter, somehow, that saying something well and truly honest for the first time since he got back should somehow fix things, but he still feels that leaden weight in his gut, same as ever. Julia finally looks like she understands, however, patting the space on the bed beside her so that she can lean her head on his shoulder, placing her hand on his.

“We never did get a chance to talk about that.”

“About what?”

“About - everything. The rebellion. After it was over, we rushed to get married. We never got a chance to really talk about what it all meant for us. The things we did. The people we lost.” She sighs, a horribly sad sound that Magnus never wanted to hear out of her, and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “You were already so experienced at fighting by the time you came to Raven’s Roost. I suppose I thought it wasn’t as hard on you as…”

“As?”

She shifts, uncomfortable now that the tables have been turned. “As it was on me. You’re not the only one who worries.”

“Oh.” And oh, that’s a rotten feeling. Of course it was still hurting her. For her, the rebellion was only a couple of months ago, their dead only just buried, the knowledge of the people they’d killed still heavy on her shoulders. Julia’s a better person than him. She never hesitated to kill when she had to, but it wasn’t something she had gotten used to, or something she wanted to get used to. “I’m sorry. I should have…”

“We still need to get used to being husband and wife instead of - oh, what would you call us? Collaborators?” She laughs lightly and though it’s a weary sound, he soaks it in. Not even Johann’s music can hold a candle to Julia’s laugh. “I’m glad it’s over. But it’s been strange.”

“Do you want to talk about it? What’s been bothering you?”

“Oh,” she says. 

It’s Magnus’ turn to wait, so he does. He’s patient like that. And beyond that, it strikes him how far they’ve come from the days when they’d engage in verbal sparring, Julia outwitting him at every turn, leaving him dumbfounded and red-faced, unable to discern affection from mockery. They still do it, but not as often as they did in courtship. Now that they’re together, _really_ together, most of her walls have been knocked down. Julia’s got her baggage too, same as anyone else.

“We killed a lot of people,” she says, tapping her fingers on Magnus’ knee in some unknown, disjointed melody. “Not all of them were bad people. Most of them weren’t. And the people I led to their deaths…” Her breath hitches.

“ _We_ led them.”

“ _I_ led them in. Don’t forget who the strategist between the two of us is. If it were all up to you, we would have just - just rushed on in.”

Magnus inclines his head. He’ll have to give her that one. She’s definitely the brains of the outfit, whether she’s dealing with the numbers and customers and orders at the Hammer and Tongs (he had watched her at her work when he first got back, enchanted all over again how she filled ledgers will small, tidy writing, quickly doing equations in her head, sorting everything out in a way that’s occasionally more magical to Magnus than magic actually is) or sorting out how to plan an entire revolution (he remembers her leaning over maps in the candlelight, shooting down ideas lobbed at her with a foreign kind of severity, quick mind working a mile a minute, tongue worrying at the corner of her mouth, _I’m trying to keep you all safe_ ). 

“We would have lost without you,” he murmurs. 

“Damn straight, we would have. It’s just… hard. Seeing things go back to normal, but with holes in it. All those kids who lost a parent, all those people out there who lost a partner. You saw all those shops that got shut down, didn’t you? Nobody left to run ‘em anymore.”

Magnus briefly considers a world where they didn’t rebel. All of those people would still be alive. In his timeline, in his original timeline, Steven and Julia and Raven’s Roost would still be whole. Maybe they could have run away, left for another village, made a warm, comfortable life for themselves.

But then Magnus wouldn’t have been the man that Julia fell in love with. But then Julia wouldn’t have been the woman he fell in love with. 

“It sucks,” he offers, which isn’t great, but it’s true enough. “But they went in there willingly. They wouldn’t have it any other way. And - “ he swallows past the lump in his throat, realizing how the very same people died for no good reason in his own timeline. “And their families will have better lives now.”

She blinks hard and rubs at one eye, wiping away a tear. He doesn't point it out. He knows she doesn't want him to. “They will. Like we do.”

“Like we do,” Magnus agrees. "You can talk to me too, you know. About this stuff. Even if there's nothing I can do to make it better, I can - I mean, we can just be sad together."

That makes Julia laugh. "Okay. We'll be sad together next time. Deal?"

"Deal." He peers at her, a little anxiously. “So… are we good?”

“We’re good.”

It’s not long after that that, well past their usual bedtime, that they finally go to sleep.

====

If Magnus himself were telling this story - and there are very few, if anyone at all who is not and who will not be directly involved at some point to ever hear this story - he would like to say that’s all that he needed, and that his sleep that night was a silent, restful one, either without dreams or with particularly happy dreams. He would like to make up some fanciful yarn about dreaming of a village inhabited solely by puppies, or of his perfect date with Julia, or even of something as foolish as a house made up of cookies. 

But one good talk doesn’t erase years of nightmares, not when he’s spending day and night in this time, in this place. It will occur to him later that it might be a kindness to the both of them to move away from Raven’s Roost, seek out their fortune in a new place that doesn’t hang so heavily with memories, but he’ll never voice it. Raven’s Roost is their home, and you’d have to use more than a pair of tongs to wrench Steven away from it, and you’d need a hell of a lot more than that to wrench Julia away from Steven.

His dream isn’t so much a dream as it is a retelling of a memory he’s re-lived too many times to count. He’s stopped at the first village on the way back to Raven’s Roost, chair in tow, and notices an odd sort of chilly silence when he steps in the nearest inn and orders an ale. The Dragonborn behind the bar, a tall, slight fellow with coppery scales and frills about his snout that look suspiciously like a goatee slides it over in stunned silence. Eventually, he’s asked where he’s going, and upon saying Raven’s Roost’s name, the Dragonborn pauses and simply says, “Oh, honey.”

Magnus doesn’t stay to finish his ale after that, nor does he take the time to rest. He stops only once he sees he’s riding his horse half to death, drops her off at the nearest stable, buys a new horse, and keeps on riding. By the time he gets back home, he’s addled with a combination of exhaustion, dread, and the persistent, intoxicating force of denial. He denies it even in this dream, even though he knows how it goes, he always knows how this goes.

By the time he returns to Raven’s Roost, swinging around the entrance opposite of the Craftsmen Corridor, it’s a ghost town. He hops off his horse and sprints through town, yelling indiscriminately (he does not remember whose names he yelled, if he yelled anyone’s names, not even in his waking moments; it’s all a horrible blur to him), but the lights are out in every shop, the equipment hurriedly packed up and taken away, and what used to be a beautiful, bustling town, his home, is empty of what made it home in the first place. He makes it to the felled bridge at Craftsmen Corridor and simply leaps down to the wreckage below (a part of him remembers that he did not do that, that he would have died upon impact no matter how hard-headed he is), and begins clawing desperately through it, shoveling his way through the ash without quite knowing whether he’s digging through the remains of houses, or the remains of people he had once called his friends.

His hands begin to bleed, but he pays them no mind, accepting that later in life, his hands will be covered in a flurry of thin, white scars that he will not be able to explain (he will never have to explain them; the ones he will call comrades will never ask), and keeps on digging, hoping to find something, _anything_ , even if it means ruining himself in the process. _A man's hands are his greatest tools,_ Steven had once told him, voice lofty in the way it always was when passing on wisdom from his own father, who learned it from his father, who learned it from his father. _If you care about your trade, you treat them like gold._ But in this moment, Magnus doesn't care if he ever carves again in his life, if he doesn't have the hands to hold an axe or to cradle the child he's never had, not if that's what stands between him and finding - oh, he doesn't know. A body, a ring, a piece of clothing, something left of their home, some sort of clue that she and Steven had left before the place was bombed, some kind of sign, because by the gods, he’s not a praying man, but if Julia and Steven are safe, he will pray from sundown to sunrise every day for the rest of his life, he swears it. 

In real life, he digs until he can dig no longer. He stays there, lungs filling with the remains of his home, until some stragglers nervously coming back to salvage the rest of their belongings find him there and gently but firmly lead him out, talking about him in hushed, worried voices behind his back, give him a place to stay until he can see more than ash and hear more than a ringing in his ears, until he can face the world again even though he finds it to be an infinitely darker place than it had once been. _You have to leave,_ they tell him, not unkindly. _He will be looking for you. We can’t risk it. We’re sorry._

But that doesn’t happen this time, not here, not now, not in this dream. Instead, he plunges his left hand into the wreckage and his wedding ring snags on something before he finds himself forcibly yanked down, cheek pressed up against the rubble, eyes widening as the ash lingering in the air coalesces and pairs upon pairs of wide eyes stare unblinkingly at him through it, watching him, and then -

And then then whatever had yanked at him turns into a hand, and it’s warm and soft with a carved, wooden ring upon its finger. It pulls him through the rubble and away from prying eyes, and Magnus bolts upright, gasping like a dying man, but he’s nowhere close to being alone - instead, Julia is there, her hands on his, carefully prying his fingers away from where his nails are digging into his palms. 

“It’s okay,” she tells him, and he’s suddenly so struck by how lucky he is to be here, how lucky he is to have her, how grateful he is that all of that can remain nothing more than a long, horrible nightmare that for the first time since he’s come to this timeline, he bursts into tears.

Magnus is not a delicate crier. He lets out long, hard, wracking sobs, face screwed up and turning redder by the moment, but once he tries to cover his face with his hands, Julia’s there, tugging him into her chest and holding him while he sobs. “It’s okay,” she tells him in a quiet, soothing litany. “I’m here. It’s okay.”

“I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for, not really, but she tells him it’s okay anyway, and it feels a little like absolution. When he’s finally calmed, she doesn’t pull away from him, one arm wrapped around his shoulders and combing through the fine hairs at the back of his head. 

Eventually, she asks, “That bad?”

“This is my home,” he tells her. “This is the first place that’s ever been my home. Here, with you. I don’t… I don’t want to lose that.”

She considers this. “Me neither.”

They go back to sleep.

====

In the morning, everything’s normal again, and Magnus is so glad that she doesn’t look at him with pity or concern that his heart feels fit to burst. He breathes a long gust of hot air in her face and she yowls, slapping his face away and yelling, “No, morning breath!” When he leans in for a kiss, mischief on his face, she presses the heel of her hand against his nose as usual and says, “Not until you brush your teeth!”

They brush their teeth and wash up and make the bed. They go downstairs and have breakfast with Steven, who good-naturedly bitches about his least favourite clients and the grocer that keeps shoving vegetables at him, and Julia bitches about having to haggle for prices that she _knows_ are wrong, and she knows that they wouldn’t give her such a hard time if they hadn’t known her since she was a girl, and Magnus doesn’t bitch at all, just sits and eats and soaks it all in. None of them are particularly gifted cooks, and in their laziness, the eggs are overcooked and the toast is charred and the rashers are served right in the pan they were cooked in, and it’s the most delicious meal Magnus has had in a long time.

Eventually, Steven leaves with a cheery sort of wave, and Julia stands up, stretching her arms above her head. “Mags, you’ll do the dishes?”

He nods.

“Good, ‘cause I don’t want to do them.” She gives him a cheeky grin and walks over to the door, putting on her boots and loading her bag up for the day. Magnus watches her but doesn’t say a word. He knows that if he speaks, he'll ask her where she's going, and it's better to remain silent than to repeat yesterday's conversation. To his surprise, she looks at him, just as carefully, and says in a tone that he knows for a fact is artificially casual, “I need to go sort out some of our deliveries. They’re going as far as Hogsfeet, but that doesn’t mean the delivery woman’s got to charge us an arm and a leg for it. I might run a few errands or see Chase after that, I might not. But I’ll be back before eight.”

He’s the luckiest man alive. He really is. He tries to sound equally as casual, but he knows that he sounds hesitant and awkward as he says, “Hogsfeet is a stupid name.”

“Right? I always think the entire place must smell like _dung_. And what will you be doing today, O Hammer?”

“I think…” He looks around him. “I think I’ll hunker down and really make some progress on some of our projects. I think the wood’s speaking to me today.”

“Good,” she says, looking genuinely relieved. "Bye!"

“I love you!” He shouts after her, and the door slams shut. 

Then, through the door, loud enough to disturb the neighbours, she hollers at the top of her lungs, “Love you too!” 

It’s not the same as it’s always been, Magnus thinks to himself as he gets up to clear off the table, but this? This careful negotiation, of telling one another what they need to hear, but never outright demanding it? This, he can do. He can do this every day of his life, for as long as he lives.

He reaches out and taps the Chalice sitting on their mantle a little affectionately as he passes by it on his way to the workshop. It's thanks to it - her - he thinks, that this is possible at all, and he's going to make every moment count.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guessed it: we're back to more tablesetting, and ANOTHER handy dandy barkeep OC! What can I say? They're useful!

When the bright, white light fades. Taako and Merle find themselves standing in a grassy clearing, with nothing but miles and miles of wretched nature on either side of them. Taako is in the middle of thinking that Merle probably doesn’t see it that way when Merle bursts out, “What gives? There’s nothing here but _grass_!”

“Right? If she wanted us to go to Ravens Roost, she should have teleported us straight there! She’s a _goddess_!”

“She can move us through _time_ , but she can’t save us a trip?”

“ _We’re_ the ones doing _her_ a favour!”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah!”

Merle and Taako stand together for a moment, looking unbearably righteous until they inevitably realize that no matter how much they gripe and groan about their current, admittedly shitty situation, that doesn’t change the nature of it. Merle lets out a long, weary sounding sigh and says, “Welp. If we want to make it to the nearest city by nightfall, we’d better get-a-walking.”

“Forget that!” Taako says. “Listen, what’ve we got, half a year? We just died horribly about a _hundred_ times. My feet hurt, I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m almost out of spell slots. I don’t know about you, but Taako ain’t walking!”

“So what, you just want to pass out in the middle of this field?”

“Yep!”

“Even though it’s the middle of the day?”

“Yyyyyyyyeeeep!”

“Even though we have no idea where we are?”

“Is there something about this whole situation you’re not getting here?” Taako asks, jabbing one long finger in Merle’s direction. “Because this whole line of questioning is getting old.”

“Even though we don’t have any of our adventuring gear like, say, tinder, or our bed rolls, or our big, ugly, hairy meatshield for when bandits attack?” That’s not a terribly kind thing to say about Magnus but, in fairness, Merle’s not feeling too charitable towards the big lug right about now. He just made both their jobs and their lives a hell of a lot more difficult than they had seemed about fifteen minutes ago.

“We don’t?”

“Our meatshield’s carrying all of our gear. Remember?”

“Well, shit!” Taako says with feeling. While he’s ready to fall on the ground and take a nap right here, he doesn’t particularly fancy the idea of sleeping on the ground if he doesn’t absolutely have to. With a snap of his fingers, he hops up and off the ground, floating in mid-air in front of Merle with his hands planted on his hips. “Where to?”

“I thought you said you were out of spell slots!”

“ _Almost_ out of spell slots! Did you not hear me when I said I’m not walking? Now, which way?”

“Well,” Merle says with the odd sort of chuckle he does when he’s perfectly aware he’s out of his depth. This particular chuckle is one Taako and, for that matter, everyone who knows Merle is well acquainted with because he frequently feels out of his depth. It’s the nice part of being a holy man. You can have no idea what the hell you’re doing, at which point you can say, _it’s up to God!_ “It sure would’ve been helpful if Istus told us what direction Raven’s Roost is in. Left?”

“Sure, whatever. Left it is.”

Long story short: they go left, Taako floating along on his back, arms tucked behind his head as though lounging in the bed he so desperately craves, and Merle trudging glumly along beside him. It’s a long, tiring trek and one that makes Merle’s feet start to ache about halfway through, but it’s a blessedly unremarkable one. Just as the sky in the horizon is starting to glow orange and red as the sun sets, they see the unmistakable plumes of smoke of a village in the distance. 

“Finally!” Taako exclaims, straightening up. “Civilization!”

They have to walk for another half hour before they actually reach the city, but when they do, they’re grateful to see that they’re not really in the middle of podunk nowhere. Taako even knows the name when they step in. It’s called Willowdale, Taako tells Merle, and it’s a town predominantly known for its output of coal thanks to flourishing mines just to the East of here. Indeed, Merle and Taako are able to pull up their hoods and fit right into the large crowd of men and women filing back into town as the sun sets, faces streaked with soot and hair rumpled from being crammed underneath a hard hat all day. Most of them don’t even look twice at Taako or Merle, they just gossip to themselves about that asshole of a foreman they’ve got, or the food they’re craving when they get back home. 

One man says that his husband’s trying out a 40-clove chicken recipe tonight. Taako pales and walks faster. 

“Hey, what’s the big deal?” Merle asks, struggling to keep up with him. His gait is shorter, as his companions delight in informing him, and it’s already been a long, long day. “You’re not the one who’s been walking all day, you know!”

“Nothing,” Taako snaps, somehow in a worse mood than before. “It’s _filthy_ here. The sooner we get to an inn, the better.”

Merle falls silent until they reach the inn, a cheery bell announcing their arrival. He takes off his hood and rubs at his face, fantasizing about the evening he’s hoping to have (a meat pie with beef and mushrooms, he thinks, with a big flagon of cold beer and some sort of sticky dessert, then a nice, long, scaldingly hot bath), but once he turns to Taako to share these desires, he notices that he’s still got his hood on. He’s fidgeting.

“Taako?”

“ _What_.”

“Never mind!” It doesn’t take long for Merle to discover what’s up, though. He walks up to the community bulletin board (Nancy’s List, the top of it cheerfully proclaims) to check exactly what date it is while Taako goes to skulk off in some corner or something, eyes flicking over the usual suspects. My cart needs protecting, I need an escort to go to the next town over, does anyone want to buy my cow, and --

 _Sizzle It Up With Taako!_

“Well, shit,” Merle mutters. He’s no idiot. Even if Taako doesn’t want to share his story with anyone else, _Merle_ knows it by now on account of the whole world knowing. Even people at the Bureau had talked about it, albeit in hushed voices and never when Taako was in the room. Taako had had a very successful cooking show, wound up poisoning a bunch of people, and then went out on the run, and that was that. The poster is a bright, gaudy affair with a painted portrait of a younger Taako - not that he looks much different, beyond having shorter hair at the time - with a mixing bowl in the crook of his elbow and a whisk in his other hand. Bright pink is involved. Glitter is involved. It’s all very _Taako_. 

Underneath the logo, there’s a list of names and dates. They’re town names, Merle realizes, and Raven’s Roost is smack dab in the middle of it, and Glamour Springs close to the end. He reaches up to put his finger on the poster, going city by city until he finds what he’s looking for: _Willowsdale_. According to the poster, Taako’s show had just been here yesterday. He turns around to where Taako is lurking, then hesitates. Yelling out the name of a guy who just had a show here a night ago isn’t a great idea. Instead, he just yells, “Hey!”

Thankfully, Taako gets the picture and walks on over, only to stare at the familiar poster, and then back down at Merle.

Merle, suddenly aware that this conversation isn’t going to go the way he wants it to just yet, decides that maybe he’s not going to make his pitch first. Instead, he taps at the top right corner, where they’re advertising t-shirts for ten gold a pop, emblazoned with Taako’s logo, Taako’s face, and what looks to be more glitter. “Those are some damn fine T-shirts.”

“You can hardly expect me to sell sub-par products,” Taako says flatly, unimpressed.

Merle clears his throat, uncomfortable, then decides that he’s never bothered with delicacy and consideration of others’ feelings too much before, so why start now? Sure, Taako’s sore over what he saw in the Chalice, but Merle is too! _He_ gets to go off on some dumb quest to fix the mistakes of the guy that chopped his damn arm off! “No, no, I suppose not. Buuuuut you might also notice…” He reaches up and taps the poster, right where it reads _Raven’s Roost_.

“Your point being?”

“My point being, if we just follow your caravan, it’ll lead us in a straight line right to where Magnus is. We’re, what, two days behind? It’s perfect!”

“No.”

“But - “

“Absolutely not.”

“But, Taako -”

“Are you deaf, old man?”

Merle huffs, crossing his arms. “Oh, sure, _suuuuure_ , make fun of my age! It’s not as though old people have _feelings_. It’s not as though you got to just flooooooat all the way over here while doddering old Merle had to walk! It’s not as though I’m just trying to get this whole mess over with! No, it’s just stupid, deaf old Merle as far as you’re concerned, and - “ Merle darts his eyes back and forth upon realizing he’s talking to the wall like he really is a crazy old man and Taako had abandoned him about halfway through his spiel. “Taako?”

He can tell where Taako is by the high pitched cry of, _Oh my god, Taako?_

Here we go again, Merle thinks, running over to catch up to where Taako’s nervously taking off his hood and leaning over the bar, batting his lashes at the barkeep. All traces of displeasure have suddenly vanished from Taako’s expression as he flaps one hand at her dismissively before demuring, “Oh please, you don’t need to make a fuss.”

“But I do!” The barkeep exclaims. Merle can see she’s a halfling now, only a little bit shorter than he is (and doubtlessly standing on a platform behind that very human-sized bar), and she’s still busy rubbing at her face as though she can’t believe her eyes. “You don’t understand! I’ve tried your recipes before, and - oh, I wanted to see your show here so _badly_! They hardly let me touch anything in the kitchen here, you know, and I wanted to really show them my stuff! I was even in the crowd on the day of your show, but… it started too late,” she says, running a hand through her short, tightly curled hair. 

“Well, I’m very sorry about that. How about this? _Next_ time I’m in Willowsdale, I’ll make sure to start my prep bright and early.”

“Sure, but…” The barkeep frowns, troubled. “I’ve stared at that gosh-darn poster of yours every day. You’re supposed to be the next town over by now. What’re you still doing here? And where’s that other fellow you were with? The big one?”

Taako looks around desperately for a moment before latching onto Merle and forcibly shoving him up onto one of the tall barstools. “I have to admit, it’s a rather embarrassing story, and I’d really rather you keep it - and my being here - to yourself. See, my _old_ driver has no sense of direction! Drove us ‘round in circles for a whole day, and I simply could _not_ let that dictate the rest of my tour. So! I came back here to find a new one. Merle here is my driver now,” he says, slapping Merle on the back.

“And I’ve got a spectacular sense of direction, if you get what I mean,” Merle adds on, winking at the barkeep. She shudders. Merle, who is used to this reaction, appears entirely unperturbed about this. 

“I suppose that makes sense,” she says, slowly. “But all of your dates are wrong now - “

“Which is, again, a _terrible_ embarrassment, and something we’ll fix up as soon as we can,” Taako says airily. “Now, will you keep quiet about this if I autograph something of yours? I’m sure you understand that we superstars need to control our own spin.” 

“Oh, yes! Yes, of course!” The barkeep practically trips as she hops off of her stool and scampers over to the kitchen. Taako lets his shoulders sag for the scant minute she’s away before she’s running on back with a worn, slightly stained yellow apron and an ink pen. “Right here on the lapel, please. Make it out to Hazel.”

Taako signs the apron with a practice flourish, then puts the pen down. “Now, as you can imagine, the two of us have a long ride ahead of us to get all caught up. Two of your _finest_ beds, please.”

“And one with a bath!” Merle pipes up.

“Our inn isn’t exactly what you’d call fancy,” Hazel says, looking worriedly between them, “so I’m not sure if it will be up to your standards. But you’ve got it, Taako!”

“And Merle,” says Merle.

“And Merle,” she repeats after him obediently, but she doesn’t look nearly so enthused about it.

He leans forward, thinking again about his ideal night, then asks, “I don’t suppose you sell any meat pies here?”

“No…” She frowns, then looks up, excitement welling up in her anew. “Oh! But you _have_ to let me cook for you! Please, you won’t even have to pay - it would mean ever so much to me.” 

Taako winks at her. “You got it, pumpkin.”

She beams at him, then slides over a key. “I’ll deliver it to your room later when it’s ready. Your room’s just up the stairs ‘round the corner, and at the very end of the hall.”

Merle and Taako finally disentangle themselves from Hazel’s enthusiasm, and Merle watches as Taako sighs the minute they’re out of earshot, looking just a little more tired than he did when they came in. “Pretty popular with the ladies, huh?” Merle says, elbowing at Taako’s side.

“Oh, yes. How thrilling.”

“Hey, don’t knock it! I fought tooth and nail to try and charm them off their feet back in my day,” Merle explains, but luckily for everyone involved, his tale of chasing that sweet, sweet dwarf tail is cut short as the door swings open and he exclaims, “Pan Almighty, that’s the most beautiful sight I’ve seen all day.”

It’s not much, but it’s a good sight better than the digs they often stay in on the road looking into this and that. The two beds are large, clean, and relatively soft, and there’s a fully stocked bathroom (and yes, a bath) just waiting to be used. 

By the time both Taako and Merle have taken a long enough bath to ease out at least a few of their aches and pains from their incredibly long day, Hazel’s knocking at the door with a big tray of food, two frosty glasses of beer, and a wide smile on her face. “I won’t stand here and watch you eat the whole thing. That would be creepy. It would be creepy, right?”

“A little creepy,” Merle agrees. 

“Just for the first bites, then,” she says, as though she's ignorant of the fact that that’s kind of creepy in its own right. The two of them dig in nevertheless. The food’s nothing special, but one look at the eagerness on her freckled face leads them both to reassure her that it’s delicious, and she walks away with a smile on her face and a song in her heart. The effect that Taako has on people is quite something, Merle reasons. She had been so thrilled just to have a little interruption from her likely dull day-to-day life, and she had cared so _much_ about what Taako had thought about her food. And, hell, she'd recognized him straightaway! It sounds like the good life to Merle, but... well, it makes what happened - what has yet to happen - that much more real. It had been easy not to think about Taako's whole deal when it was safely in the past, but confronting it as the present is an entirely different story. No wonder he'd been such a wreck when they'd first met up. Doesn't take a lot to turn the tides when you're that well known, that's for damn sure.

They eat in silence, then lower the blinds and get ready for bed. By the time Merle’s tucked in, hair piled high in a bun atop his head and beard braided in two, tidy pleats, he simply lies there, trying not to pay too much attention to the way his feet still throb and his body still aches with the imaginary pains of more deaths than he’s particularly comfortable contemplating.

Taako’s got his eyes shut, but he sure as hell isn’t sleeping - or even meditating, Merle can tell. There’s too much tension in his brow for that. “Psst. Hey. Taako. I was thinking about what you said. Back with June.”

Taako groans, placing his hands over his face. “Can you not shut up for one night?”

“No, I’m serious. You said that it wasn’t really your fault. Meaning someone _else_ did it. Must’ve been that guy whats-her-face mentioned.”

“What of it?”

“We could always kill him.”

 _That_ gets Taako to finally open his eyes and glance over at Merle. It’s dark in their room, but Merle’s got good night vision, and he can tell it’s the most honest he’s looked all day, eyes wide in bewilderment instead of that awful, shuttered expression he’s been wearing ever since he realized what was going on. “Didn’t Istus tell us not to change anything?”

“Of course she did! She’s the goddess of _fate_! That’s her job! But I don’t see why the hell we should listen to that. I mean, we’re trashing this entire timeline anyway," he says with a chuckle.   
"Nothing we do matters, so who cares what we do in it?”

“That’s true.”

“Hell, if you don’t want to do it, I’ll do it for you.”

Taako snorts, and while it’s not a wholly mirthful sound, it’s a lot lighter than he’d sounded before. “You’re a shitty cleric, Merle.”

“What can I say? I march to the beat of my own drummer. Now, there’s no wisdom in making any hasty decisions, but if it makes things easier for you… I don’t see what’s stopping us.”

“Right.” Taako is silent for long enough to make Merle think that that’s all he’s going to hear out of the man before he says, “I’ll think about it.”

The way Taako says it sounds close enough to _thank you_ for Merle’s liking, and it finally puts him at ease enough to allow him to sink into a long, deep, well-deserved slumber.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick note this time! I'm fudging timelines a little here because, as far as I can figure out, the calamity at Raven's Roost happened AFTER the Sizzle It Up Incident. I've decided to toss canonical timelines out the window in favour of hopefully writing a better, more interesting story, so in my slightly revised timeline of events, the poisoning of Glamour Springs takes place a good few months after Raven's Roost. I also won't be playing a whole lot with Merle's backstory, which is a shame because I love him to bits (which is why these chapters are mainly in his POV), but there's not a whole lot to play with WRT his arm or WRT his backstory without taking a little beachfaring detour.
> 
> And that's about it for this chapter! Thanks again for reading, and a big thank you to those of you who've been leaving me such lovely comments! I really do appreciate it.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, it's been a while, hasn't it? Life popped off in a big (and not so nice) way, so I'm not going to lie to you guys: this chapter's going to be a little choppy! I started writing it immediately after publishing the last one, but only got to write it in fits and spurts since then and at this point, I just want to send it off so I can get going on some other fun stuff I've got planned. I may go back and do some editing, but for now, let's keep trucking on forward! Thanks a bunch for your patience, and for anyone who's popped in to comment or read this since I published the last chapter.

When Merle wakes up, it’s to the sound splashing water from the washroom. Taako must be freshening up, Merle reasons, taking his sweet time stretching out the aches and pains in his back and shoulders, combing out his beard, and popping his joints.

“That’s disgusting!” Comes a high-pitched voice in the washroom.

“Just wait ‘til you get old! Besides, that’s no way to speak to your elders. I’ve got to do something about these pooooor aching bones of mine,” Merle snipes right back at him, though if he presses up to the door and cracks his neck loudly enough for Taako to get a real good listen, well, Magnus isn’t exactly here to tell on him. He chuckles at the ensuing cry of _yuck_ , then gets to organizing his pack. 

Eventually, he hears someone clearing his throat behind him, and when he turns around, he’s astonished to come face to face with a human. He’s a very pretty human, at least, with long dark hair and a high brow, deep-set eyes and a small nose. “What the hell?”

“Disguise Self. Keep up, Merle,” Taako’s voice says crisply (he hadn’t bothered trying to change that, Merle supposes), as he unfolds an advertisement in front of Merle’s nose.

He squints. “Wanted… sellswords for a traveling caravan with the Neverwinter Militia…” His eyes dart from the parchment back to Taako again. “What’s this all about?”

“Just our ticket to Raven’s Roost,” Taako says smugly, hiding the piece of paper somewhere up his expansive sleeves again. “Of course, if I went out with my usual flair, they’d recognize me. Here’s the skinny: the militia’s on their way to Raven’s Roost, they’re asking for mercenaries to help them along the way, and _we’re_ just the ones to provide that help. For a tidy sum, too.”

Merle frowns, questions whizzing around in his brain. The first one he manages to snatch onto is simple: “Are you sure about this, Taako? I mean, we follow Sizzle It Up, we stay a couple days behind ‘em, we never even _see_ them. No hanging around a militia, no having to cast Disguise Self on yourself every morning - I mean, doesn’t that just sound… easier?”

It sucks that Taako cast Disguise Self on himself. If Merle finds him difficult to read on a good day, he’s finding him impossible to read in this unfamiliar face. It’s also a little annoying, to be fair, that Taako’s famous enough to need to disguise his face, but old, boring Merle? Nahhh. He’s _fine_ the way he is. 

“Easy, shmeasy,” Taako says, flapping one hand at him. “This will be a direct route there! And the sooner we get there, the sooner we can get back to the Bureau! Hot showers, meals already provided for us, our own _beds_...”

Merle’s not an idiot. He knows that Taako just doesn’t want to risk running into his old show again. But who’s he to argue the point? He just digs his hands into his pockets and heaves a grumbling sigh. “Why are they hiring mercenaries in the first place? They’re the militia!”

Taako holds up one hand and rubs his thumb against his middle and index finger meaningfully. _Money_. “Some rich guy got his stupid ass killed, and some _other_ rich guy wants everyone to really look into it, so they’re bulking up. They say their biggest suspect is someone from Raven’s Roost.”

“You don’t think it could be…”

“Could be.” Taako shrugs. It’s not as though the three of them don’t have the tendency to get a little murdery when they run into an inconvenience here and there. With the way Magnus had been talking about having to go back, Merle was pretty sure he wasn’t going back to kill anyone, but… what did he know? 

“I suppose we should keep an eye on it. What’s the story?”

“Do we _need_ a story? We’re sellswords, we hit shit hard, end of story.”

“Come on!” Merle protests. “At least codenames! I think I’ll be… Leeman Kessler.”

“You can’t be Leeman Kessler. We already did that.”

“So what? They don’t know that. Who are _you_ going to be?”

“Leon Kessler.”

“Bullshit! If I can’t be Leeman Kessler, then you can’t be a Kessler either!”

Merle and Taako squabble for the next fifteen minutes before deciding that Merle can remain Leeman Kessler after all, and Taako decides to go as Jerry. _A classic,_ Taako claims, but threatens to out him as Merle the second Merle decides to put on that ridiculous accent again, and he begrudgingly agrees. With that decided, it doesn’t take them to get out the door and over to meet the militia.

The militia looks, unsurprisingly, like a bunch of criminals. Criminals surrounded by legitimate men in uniform, mind you, but criminals nonetheless, shifty-eyed and quiet, with more weapons than any reasonable person should have on their person and a distinct menacing air to their whole business. The official militia members themselves look less than pleased with this arrangement, mainly sticking closely to one another and studiously looking away from the band of mercenaries they’ve amassed. Merle wishes, not for the last time, that they just decided to follow Taako’s caravan instead, but they’ve committed. They’re greeted by a massive Tiefling in a captain’s uniform, clearly the sharpest and the most professional of the bunch. “You must be the mercenaries that answered our advertisement,” he says shortly, staring down at them imperiously. “Well? Go on, then.”

“Go on what?” Merle asks. Taako elbows him. Merle elbows him back. They have a brief elbowing party. The Tiefling doesn’t look amused.

“First, I think we should get your name,” Taako says, pointing one finger at the Captain, imperious even now.

The Tiefling sighs. It is a heavy, tired sound. He rubs at the base of his right horn before saying, in a low, sonorous voice, “Very well, then. My name is Captain Quinn, and if you prove to be proficient enough to secure a position for the remainder of this journey, I will be your employer. If I am to employ you, there will be none of this nonsense from you. I run a tight ship, and I am letting… mercenaries onto my team only underneath strict orders, and to ensure that _my_ men make it out of this safely. That is not to say that it will be unworthy of your time; I assure you, you will be compensated handsomely for your efforts. Am I understood?”

“Yeesh,” Taako mutters underneath his breath. “This guy makes the Director look like a pussycat.”

“I believe so,” Merle says, a little bit louder. 

“Good.” Captain Quinn nods. “Names and qualifications.”

“Leeman Kessler at your service!” Merle says, then leans to the side a little. Being short, even for a dwarf, he has to lean _way_ to the side and hop a little to get a good look at their new traveling companions before swiveling his head back to get a good look at Captain Quinn. “And, from the looks of it, you fellows are low on healers. That is, unless that lady sharpening her teeth on her knife happens to be a Cleric.”

Captain Quinn turns his head and gives the motley crew a brief, despairing glance as he sees that one elf is, indeed, sharpening her teeth on her knife. “No,” he says shortly. “She’s not a Cleric.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so. Now, with this group, you shouldn’t _need_ an extra healer hanging around, but you don’t strike me as the sort of guy who likes taking chances. With me around, you’ll have a few extra heal spells on hand, make sure that any of your men that get nicked up get nice and healed, lickety split.”

“I’m Jerry,” Taako says, “and I’m a bomb wizard.”

“Is that all?”

“Sure is, my fella.” Taako offers him a winning, flirtatious smile, which appears to have little to no effect. “Let me stick around, and you might just find out how far my skills can getcha.”

“We come as a package,” Merle hastens to add on. “You want me, you get him. We’re old, uh… old friends! Well, co-workers. Co-workers turned friends. I’m sure you know how it is.”

“I’m sure that I do not,” Captain Quinn says wearily. “But we do need another healer on standby, so I suppose we’ll simply have to give you a chance. You’re on probation until we reach the next city. Then I’ll decide whether or not you’re worth keeping around.”

“You might want to assess keeping rooty tooty high n’ hooty around too. He’s having a real intense conversation with his pet there.”

Captain Quinn turns around to look despairingly at one of the mercenaries, having a staring contest with his owl. Merle wonders if that’s his familiar or something, but that may just be wishful thinking.

“I will be assessing all of you,” Captain Quinn says, then does the wisest thing he’s done all day: walk away. Merle holds his hand up to high five Taako, but upon not receiving any recognition for his efforts, slaps Taako’s thigh instead on account of the fact that that’s about as far as he can reach.

\----

The rest of it feels horribly, depressingly familiar. While neither of them will ever voice it, Merle knows for a fact that they’re better off at the Bureau than they were beforehand, just three sub-par adventurers taking jobs for scratch, never staying in one place for more than a week or so at a time, never really getting used to seeing the same faces day in and day out. After Merle fled from his responsibilities, he spent an awful long time riding in caravans not unlike this one, and he suspects Taako has too from the way they both settle down in the back automatically, like they’ve both done this a hundred times.

This kind of job is exactly what they’ve been avoiding at the Bureau. Neither of them bother chatting much. There’s not much to talk about, quite frankly, nothing that won’t give away their cover immediately, and their surrounded by mercenaries and the militia alike. It’s not a great scene, and here, they don’t exactly have the Director or moon bubbles to bail them out if anything goes wrong.

Of course, nothing does go wrong, at least not for the first few days. Oh, the days are long and monotonous, the swaying of the caravan lulling them into drowsiness even as the sun beams in through the cracks, their company loud and unpleasant, with Captain Quinn keeping a close eye on them and the rest of their company throughout. It’s enough to make Merle daydream about going back up to the moonbase so they can get shot out of a cannon again. It’s a more civilized method of travel, that’s for damn sure.

But no journey goes smoothly forever. Merle finds himself jostled out of what he claims were prayers but was actually a nap with a loud cry from Captain Quinn: “ _Bandits!_ ”

Maybe a year ago, this sort of thing would be alarming to them. Now? Seeing a horde of angry looking men and women on horseback armed to the teeth with magic and lots of pointy objects and fire arrows just look pedestrian, somehow, because at least they’re not trapped in a hellish death loop, pursued by an enormous worm.

They both rush out of the safety of the covered wagon to look at the scene in front of them, hair whipping wildly in the wind, and see two of the caravans already stopped, one forced to fight the bandits at a standstill and the other on fire. Captain Quinn, who had heretofore seemed like a reasonable man, is not doing the smart thing of staying with the pack that’s still moving at a good speed, but instead leaps off of the moving caravan with a mighty yell, halberd aloft as he charges towards the felled caravans to aid them single-handedly.

“Yeah, fuck that,” Taako says. “This is our ride!”

It’s not the kind of Cool Guy Line that Taako usually tries to whip out, but he holds his Umbra Staff aloft and points it at the horde. There’s a massive cracking sound that makes the rest of the militia and mercenaries in their caravan gasp and duck down, but shortly afterwards, a wave of crackling, electrical energy sweeps through them, sending them hurtling back and off of their steeds. As they stand up, movements ragged and shaky, assessing how long it will take to get back onto their horses, Merle steps forward, cracking his knuckles.

“I cast… _spike growth_!” 

“You don’t need to announce what spell you’re doing every time you do one!”

“I don’t get to cast a lot of spells!” Merle gripes, brows bristling impressively. “I need to make the most of it!” With a wave of his hand, spiked vines grow underneath the bandits, ensnaring them in their grasp and halting them in their tracks with a loud cry of horror and alarm. As Merle clenches one hand into a fist and twists, they wrap more snugly around their prey, and Merle chuckles. Those are his babies, right there.

“Gross,” Taako says. Merle elects to ignore him, instead grinning as he sees that the bulk of the bandits aren’t going anywhere, not for a long time, at least not unless they don’t want their ankles to get all fucked up. As it turns out, some of them have a decidedly Magnus Burnsides way of thinking, and they yanks themselves out with a roar, ignoring the blood they leave in their wake, and charge their cart. These ones are the big guns, Merle figures, not the chaff like the rest. He and Taako make quick work of a couple of them from afar, but they’ve never been close combat fighters, and one of the burlier bandits is rushing towards them with a single-minded determination that cuts through any Magic Missiles and plant-based obstacles that they send his way. He winds up leaping onto their cart with a loud scream, hoists the lance from off of his back, and swings it in a wide arc. Merle jumps out of the way, but Taako isn’t quite so lucky; he gets a nasty gash in his chest that he stumbles away from, then _continues_ stumbling away from, because fuck this, he did not sign up for this kind of bodily harm, thank you very much. Merle wraps his hands around Li’l Choppy and tries to get a good swing in, but between the axe and his admittedly short arms, he gets absolutely nowhere.

Suddenly, there’s a loud cry of, “Heads up!”

It’s the elf that had been sharpening her teeth to dangerous points before, and in her hands is a bow and arrow, the arrows dripping with some unknown, gelatinous substance. In a single moment, she does a flip off of the roof of the caravan and lets loose three arrows into the chest of the barbarian, _thunk-thunk-thunk_ , in quicktime. The barbarian looks up at her with a gruesome sneer, evidently entirely unaffected.

“Hey, sis?” Merle says, worriedly. “Not to let the air out of your sails or anything, but that didn’t do shit!”

“Just wait for it,” the elf woman says, and then things start getting corrosive, his armour and clothing melting away, and after that - well. It’s pretty damn gross, all things told, but at least they’re no longer in danger. They do, however, have a pretty melty looking guy on their hands afterwards, but Merle makes the executive decision of not dwelling on it for too long.

“You’re welcome,” she says, smugly, then hops off of the roof of the caravan. Her eyes linger on the two of them for just a little too long for comfort, but they shake it off - they _have_ to, because shortly afterwards, they hear Captain Quinn a-hollering again.

“Stop! All the bandits are either dead, or know better than to come after us by now. We need to make some repairs, and tend to the wounded. You, Kessler - you branded yourself a Cleric, didn’t you? Time to show me whether or not I should have just left you behind in the last town.”

“Hey!” Merle says, offended. Sure, Magnus and Taako get on his case for not healing them often enough all the time, but it’s something else entirely to have some stranger rag on him too. “Watch your tone! I _am_ a Cleric, and a damn good one, too! Just show me where I need to go.”

After that, it’s business as usual. Merle heals who he can - though he starts with Taako and the elf woman that had saved them, because a dwarf’s got to have his priorities straight - while the rest of the team performs as much first-aid as they can on their own and perform all the necessary repairs to the broken wagons to get them up and running again. Captain Quinn paces restlessly around them all the while like a man possessed, doing little more than kicking dirt up as he prowls around them, clearly anxious to get going again. No amount of sharp orders and glares can get them moving any faster than they already are, however, and it’s not long before night falls.

“Enough!” Quinn says, finally. “You’ve done well today, men, but we’re not going anywhere. Not tonight. Tonight, we rest. Mitchell, Sarkin, you start a fire. Cotter, you whip up some food, and make it good this time - Kessler’s worked hard today, he gets extra. The rest of you, line up. We’re taking watch shifts. The injured get to sleep all night.”

“Me, Jerry and Kessler will take third shift,” the elf with the fanged teeth says, immediately.

Captain Quinn looks her over, long and hard, but can’t seem to find anything wrong with that statement. “Fine,” he says, tersely. “You three get the third shift. Jerry? Kessler? Any objections?”

Merle and Taako exchange glances, and just wind up shrugging at each other. They don’t know what she wants, but they do know that they’d rather find out tonight than another five days into their journey, when it’s too late. “Fine by us, Cap’n,” Merle says, gruffly, and Captain Quinn moves on. When they turn to the elf, hoping to find something telling in her gaze, they find that she’s vanished from sight, having since escaped to another one of the caravans, or off to the nearest forest to take a shit. They don’t really know.

They eat their stew in relative silence by the fire (it’s not particularly good, but it’ll stick to your ribs, and that’s what matters) and after dinner, Cotter - the cook, a gnome who’s clearly a part of the militia and uncomfortable with the other mercenaries - beckons Merle over with a grin before giving him a package of something tightly wrapped in parchment paper and twine. “For healing me,” he says, then claps Merle warmly on the back before shooing him away. When he peels away a corner of it, he has to grin at seeing that it’s dense, crumbly shortbread, a balm to the flavourless food they’d served for dinner.

He breaks off a square to share with Taako before they unroll their bedrolls, too thin and flimsy to provide much protection from the hard, cold ground, and finally get a little rest.

\----

Merle wakes up to a set of extremely sharp teeth hovering over him. Okay, okay, it’s just the creepy elf lady, but it’s not a _great_ way of waking up, so he does so with a sharp, startled yelp, and she quickly claps one hand over his mouth, shushing him. 

“Shush! You’re going to wake everyone else up!” She hisses, and Merle grunts unhappily, sitting up and making a show of working out the kinks in his back.

“Could’ve woken me up a little more gracefully,” he grumbles.

“All I did was nudge you, you old codger. Wake up your friend. It’s time for our watch. The last guys already conked out.”

Merle gets up to wake up Taako, and --

“Ugh! Your whole ass is hanging out!”

\-- and adjusts his perfectly nice pajamas to button up the flap before waking up Taako, who looks none too happy about it, and shows his displeasure by hopping in his sleep sack all the way over to the fire, where they sit down on a couple of logs a few of the other guards had rolled over. He looked ridiculous hopping over, but sitting out in the chill of the night now, Merle can’t help but feel a little jealous.

“Right. So -- “

“No, no, darling, I think we’ve earned the right to go first. Your name, please? I mean, _we’ve_ just called you Little Miss Shark Mouth behind your back, but I _assume_ you’d appreciate being called something else. But if you prefer Sharkie, please, go on.”

That’s just like Taako, Merle thinks. Always one to establish who’s in control before the conversation’s ever started. The woman opens her mouth, as if to come up with a witty comeback, pauses, and frowns. 

“I practically don’t want to tell you my name on principle now. But it’s not like it’s a _secret_. So, uh… Robin. Nice to meet you? I guess? This really isn’t how I wanted to start this conversation.”

“Right, right, Robin, hail and well met and all that.” Taako’s sleeping sack moves a little bit, like he’s gesturing from inside of it. “Well, weeeee are Jerry and Kessler.”

“Yes. I know. I - I called you by your names earlier. Other people called me by my name earlier too!” She says, peeved. “I’m not secretive, you’re just inconsiderate!”

Merle clears his throat. “In fairness to us, we just met all of you guys. You already know everyone else! We’re like the teacher on the first day of school. We’ve gotta remember thirty names. Ish.”

“I’ve already forgotten the Captain’s name,” Taako volunteers.

Robin pinches at the bridge of her nose. “I’m starting to rethink how I was going to approach this. You seemed a lot more impressive before you opened your mouths.”

Merle lets out a hoot of laughter. “Story of our lives.”

“All right,” Robin says. “All right. All right. I’m - you know what? I’m going to start this the way I wanted to before that whole clusterfuck of a conversation. Which is to say that you two? Are way, _way_ too skilled to do a bum job like this one. You outclass everyone else here, except for myself, obviously. And if you’re not doing it for the gold, I want to know what you’re doing it for. What business do you have with this mission? What business do you have with one of these places we’re going to?”

Taako and Merle exchange looks. Slowly, Merle says, “That’s a whole lot of questions, Missy. The gold’s not _that_ bad.” 

Robin’s eyes narrow. “Don’t play me for a fool,” she says shortly. “And if you don’t tell me, I’ll be speaking with the Captain tomorrow to look a little more into you, _Kessler_. Accomplished dwarf like yourself, I’m sure we should find something on you.”

“Now, hold on!” Merle says. “You said yourself that you’re as good as us! Why don’t we go talk to the Captain first? Hell, we could do it right now. We outnumber you.”

“Because he already knows why I’m doing it,” Robin says with a roll of her eyes. 

“And why’s that?”

“I don’t need to tell you a damn thing.” She sighs, then leans over to the fire, where there’s a kettle hanging off of the rickety rack hanging over it, grabs a tin cup, and pours herself a cup of coffee. Merle breaks the dramatic tension by grabbing at a cup for himself and offering one to Taako as well, because if they’re going to have a conversation, they’re at least going to be well-caffeinated for it.

“How about this?” Taako pipes up. “The hell do you care what we’re in it for? Have you _seen_ the people you’ve surrounded yourself with? I mean, really, really taken a look at them? Consider your life choices when the two people with any actual competence are the ones with you, saving your collective asses. You see that guy over there? Does he smell like he’s bathed in the past three months to you? Maybe he should be your first priority.”

“He probably hasn’t,” Robin admits. “But you’re proving my point, here. I’m not worried about my own survival. I’m worried about what you two want.”

Merle and Taako attempt to silently communicate with one another, which more or less amounts to a lot of shrugging at making faces at each other that Robin can absolutely see and watches with a steadily draining amount of patience before they inevitably come to the conclusion that they have to tell her something.

“If you must know,” Merle says, “We just wanted to take a route straight to Raven’s Roost, and this was the quickest way to do it. We have a… friend there - “

“Some friend,” Taako mutters, and Merle can’t begrudge him for it this time.

“ -- and we need to talk to him as soon as we can.”

She arches a brow at them. “Is that so? And all you want to do with him is talk?”

“Wha - yes! Hell, we’re not aiming on killing the guy! The opposite of that. He made a shitty decision, and we gotta talk him out of it, that’s all. More than anything else, we’re saving his lousy ass.”

“Even after he…” She pauses, searching Taako’s face for any clues as to what their friend did, and finding nothing. “Presumably screwed you guys over?”

“Eh. Family. You know how it is. But we’ve gotta get there soon. That’s it.”

“What’d he do?”

“Made a… uh…” Merle grimaces. Even after things have gone sour, he’s not happy writing his whole deal off as a bad decision, but it’s the most cogent way he can think of putting it. “Questionable marital decision. It’s gonna bite him in the ass.”

“Oh. Shit. Good luck with _that_. Is that really it?”

“I’ll even swear it on the Extreme Teen Bible if you want me to.”

“Fine. Fine, I believe you. For now.”

“Your turn. Why are you with this group?” Taako asks.

“For the same reason as you, I suppose,” she says, caution in her expression. “I need to get to a town just short of Raven’s Roost. My cousin runs an inn there. It's about time for me to settle down, lend her a hand while I'm at it."

“You don’t look like the type to settle down,” Merle says. “You know, you work at an inn, you gotta greet people, you let them know the inn’s safe and clean and cozy, and you give ‘em a big, reassuring smile, try _not_ to shoot too many arrows into 'em?”

She groans. “Okay, fine, _fine_. Things have been a little tumultuous there, I suppose you’d say. She’s a great lady, don’t get me wrong, but not much of a fighter. We’re more sisters than cousins, and if anyone got in the way of her safety - and I’m looking directly at _you two_ \- I’d rather someone be there.”

Merle stretches his arms out in front of him. That’s a reasonable enough answer, he supposes. There’s nothing that gets your hackles up like family. There are few people out there who wouldn’t stoop to threatening random strangers if they thought they were up to something fishy in their family’s neighbourhood, even if Merle’s always one for negotiating over immediate violence - mostly because he’s not all that skilled at violence in the first place.

Taako hasn’t moved much this whole time. Feigning disinterest, Merle supposes (he still seems pretty sore over being here in the first place, let alone the whole Magnus betrayal thing, and Taako’s always been slow to forgive someone stealing his snacks, let alone a real blow to what Merle’s pretty sure they all had at least tacitly understood as being more than just co-workers), but the bottom of his sleep sack is bouncing in more or less the same way that Taako flicks one of his ankles when he’s thinking about something.

“So. _Tumultuous_. What are the chances of you telling us what’s going on here? Since we’re after the same thing and all, there’s no harm in giving us a little background to work off of.”

“Yeah! What’s the scoop?”

“Oh, no. Uh-uh. You’re not getting away with this that easily,” she says, setting her mug down onto the dirt and pulling out a pocketknife. She uses the tip of it to dig away at the dirt that’s collected underneath her fingernails, which a crunchy guy like Merle is no stranger to, but Taako wrinkles his nose at. “I’m not a cozy barmaid yet.” She flashes them a grin that’s decidedly unpleasant, but all of her grins are. “You want information, you’ve gotta trade for it. C’mon. Give me something. I’ve got the dirt, and you’ve got all the - I mean, you guys seem capable enough. Surely you’ve got _something_.”

“Uh…” Merle scratches his nose. “Oh! I’ve got shortbread! You want shortbread?”

She’s silent for a moment. Her fingers twitch. Her foot taps at the ground. “That’s not a good trade between mercenaries. You know that, right?”

“It’s very _nice_ shortbread.”

“Fuck. Yeah. Yeah, I really, really want that shortbread. The food on this trip is like poison. That counts as one half of your trade, just so we’re clear.”

“Crystal.”

“Okay. Your turn, Jerry.”

Taako rustles in his sleepsack, then ducks his head in. “Well… I need that… I need that… oh, I _definitely_ need that. This? No way, that one’s mine.” He pops his head out again. “Say, Merle, we’re gonna be done this shit in - what, four weeks? Tops?”

Merle weighs the journey ahead of them in his head. A few weeks to get to Raven’s Roost, sure, and once they get there, they shouldn’t have to stick around too long to convince Magnus. Once they get there, all hell will break loose, one way or another. 

“Something like that.”

“You, Little Miss Shark Mouth, there aren’t any famous ice wizards there, right? No weird emperors making shitty ice castles or casting permanent winters or freezing people into living ice sculptures or whatever?”

“It’s Robin.”

“And you’ve been demoted for being greedy. Answer the question, darling.”

“I mean… no? Not that I know of? It’s a little too residential for all that shit.”

“Perfect. Then you’ve got yourself a _steal_. Here you go, one bona-fide Ring of Frost. It’s all yours.” Taako drops the ring in Robin’s waiting palm, who inspects it briefly before shrugging and pocketing it. The rationale is a little weird, but a magical item is a magical item, so she’s not about to complain - and neither is Merle, considering they’re just going to get all their shit back once they return things to normal anyway.

“Okay, Kessler.” She pauses. “You know I know these aren’t your real names, right? My whole threat about looking into your names was to call your weird fake name bluff. You figured that one out?”

“We know,” Merle says.

“Just checking. You two are a little dense. Anyway, the second half of the trade.”

Merle pauses. “We-ell. I was saving it for when we really needed it, but I’ve got some - you know, some wacky tobacky hanging around. Not for _giving_. For _sharing_.”

“Hell yeah! Light it up, old man. I’ll take it. While you’re busy, you, Not-Really-Jerry -- “

“Okay,” Merle interrupts, “if we’re going to keep our deal, you’re going to need to stop doing that.”

“ -- your turn to ask the questions. Lay ‘em on me.” 

“All right.” Taako pauses to study his own nails which are, even with Disguise Self making him look a little less put-together than usual, _impeccable_. “Let’s start with a soft ball. I’ve been _dying_ to know. I’m all about having your own look. Perfectly respectable. But why the teeth?”

“Really? You’re still on about that?”

“It does seem like a pain in the ass,” Merle says. “If you bit your own tongue, that’d end really poorly. And if you wanted to get… you know… _intimate_ with -”

“Gross! Gross, gross, shut up, Merle!” 

“So your name’s Merle!” Robin crows. “Wait, why’s that a secret? I’ve never heard of a famous Merle.”

“It’s my road name! I get to have a road name! Geez, it was an honest question!” Merle grumbles, then gestures widely with one hand. “Since bozo over there doesn’t like to hear anyone but himself speak, you might as well answer his question.”

“Because when someone’s trying to grab you, they put a hand over your mouth, and if you think it’d hurt if I bit my tongue by accident, just imagine what it feels like when I bite someone on _purpose_. That, and they look extremely cool.”

Taako nods. “Respectable enough answer, I suppose.”

“Can we ask the important questions now?”

“That was important,” Taako says. “But okay, since I’m satisfied. So! Who died, and why’s this asshole such a big deal?”

“Governor Kalan,” she says. “He’s not a guy many people will be _mourning_ , let’s just say that much. People are all worked up about what his death means for everyone else, not because he was a good guy. The opposite, actually. You know how this kind of story goes: he was ruling Raven’s Roost with an iron fist until everyone finally had enough and staged a rebellion. They booted him out, and that was supposed to be the end of it until he showed up in an alleyway with a slit throat. Kinder way of killing him than he probably deserved.”

Kinder way of killing him? Sure, Merle thinks. But that’s not Magnus’ MO, not in the least. He has a particularly concussive way of dealing with his enemies; even when he kills people, it’s _usually_ in the heat of battle, and they tend to meet the wrong side of his axe. Hell, they sometimes just meet the blunt part of his axe. That boy can hit, and he can hit hard. Slitting someone’s throat is quiet, and purposeful, and not at all like him.

“Where was he killed?” Merle asks.

“Hornsey.”

“ _Hornsey_?” Taako hoots. “That’s the name of the place? Really? _Hornsey_?”

“Now now,” Merle says, magnanimously. “I’m sure there’s a good reason for it. Maybe they found some sort of horned animal there, or they worshipped, uh…”

“Oh, no,” Robin says, all good cheer now. “It started off as a brothel. It’s a very, very horny place.”

Taako wipes a tear from his eye. “Thank you for this gift. Uh, not-Merle, pass the pipe, my dude. No hogging.” He grabs the offered pipe from Merle and takes a big toke before passing the pipe over to Robin, taking his sweet old time to puff a few good old-fashioned smoke rings before he gets back to business. “All right, so this Kalan dick gets offed in Hornytown, and because he _was_ some important big shot, they sent all the King’s horses after whoever did it. That right?”

“Mmm. Mmmhmm.” Robin, in the meantime, is giving a big thumbs up to Merle, which Merle appreciates. Having an ally on their side is much preferable than scary teeth lady being a foe. 

“Okay, so why are we headed to Raven’s Roost?”

“Oh, that one’s easy.” Robin coughs on the smoke, pounds one fist against her chest. “Sorry. It’s been a while. Anyway, the leaders of the rebellion in the first place are the Burnsides. The Hammer, specifically. Damn silly name, if you ask me. He’s the face of the whole thing, so he’s suspect number one when it comes to killing him.”

That’s exactly what Merle didn’t want to hear. He grimaces. He can’t really imagine Magnus leading a rebellion (Magnus can hardly lead a charge to the dining hall when it comes to him and Taako), but they all have shit they keep to themselves, but the boy does habitually rush on in. He can tell that Robin’s watching him carefully, but at this point? He doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether or not she knows that they’re pals. Distantly, he hears Taako speak again.

“So we’re going there with all of these mercenaries on a lead?”

“Well.” Robin shifts, looking a little uncomfortable now. “The Captain wants to talk to him and to detain him, all legal-like. But… the higher ups who hired the lot of us in the first place have something else in mind. Even if he didn’t do it, the nobles aren’t exactly big fans of anyone who’d lead a rebellion against one of their own. But Raven’s Roost _loves_ the Burnsides. They’re not expecting them to go down without a fight.”

“We’re headed to Raven’s Roost to kill Magnus,” Taako says, flatly.

She nods. “You got it.”

Taako and Merle exchange looks before Merle voices what the both of them are thinking:

“Well, _shit_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fantasy Town Generator, god bless it, came up with Hornsey. It was too good not to use.


End file.
